Oxford's Peculiar Pitt Rivers Museum

This approaching weekend as part of our Cultural Programme we are going to the Pitt Rivers Museum.  Here is some handy details regarding this great museum.

Oxford is home to a wide variety of intriguing museums, amongst them the impressive Ashmolean and the ancient Museum of the History of Science. But tucked away behind the spectacular Museum of Natural History lies a treasure trove of obscure delights. This is the Pitt Rivers Museum, founded in 1884 by Augustus Pitt–Rivers, a military man with a bristling set of side whiskers and a Victorian thirst to discover and understand the empire and the world.

During his research into firearm development, Augustus discovered some ancient flint tools which sparked an obsession with collecting artefacts, past and present, from a plethora of cultures. He later donated his 22,000-piece collection to the University of Oxford, thus establishing the Pitt Rivers Museum.

The museum’s collection has now grown to 500,000 items, many of which have been donated by travellers, scholars and missionaries and includes fascinating anthropological and archeological artefacts from all over the world. Shrunken heads, tribal costumes and masks and even a witch in a bottle are just a few of the gems that attract visitors to the museum.

Fiona Bruce, presenter of BBC 1’s popular programme Antiques Roadshow recently wrote the following in a review of the museum:

‘If Indiana Jones created a museum, this Oxford institution would be it. A collection of half a million objects from all around the world crammed in glass cabinets, packed into drawers, mounted on the walls and hanging from the ceiling in a galleried hall illuminated beneath a soaring neo-gothic roof created from 8,000 individual glass tiles.’

For more details, visit the museum’s website: www.prm.ox.ac.uk

Source: 'Fiona Bruce's Britain: The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford', www.telegraph.co.uk