‘The Choicest, Best-Arranged Museums I Have Ever Seen’: The Pitt-Rivers Museum, Farnham, Dorset, 1880s–1970s

Abstract

The privately owned Pitt-Rivers Museum in Farnham, Dorset, was established by General Pitt-Rivers in the early 1880s. A discussion of the original purpose of the museum and its early development is followed by an account of its later history.

Keywords:

• museums
• display
• archaeology
• anthropology

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Jeremy Coote and Alison Petch for their invitation to contribute a paper, the crafting of which proved to be more of a pleasure than an academic chore because it provided a happy reminder of exciting times some 40 years ago. The final text was greatly improved by their knowledgeable, yet kindly, editing. I must then pay tribute to those who played an unsung role in recording and removing the Pitt-Rivers Collection from Farnham to Salisbury in 1970. This challenging task was eased enormously by the support and archaeological talents of my late wife, Eleanor, an assistant curator at Salisbury Museum at the time, and by the freely given practical assistance of the staff of the Wiltshire County Conservation Service. I am grateful to Anthony Pitt-Rivers for his advice and for permission to reproduce photographs in his possession. I am also grateful to Salisbury Museum for access to its photographic collection, and to David Cousins for creating digital images for publication. In preparing this article, I have made extensive use of the materials made available on the website of the Pitt Rivers Museum’s ‘Rethinking Pitt-Rivers’ project, at <http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/rpr/>; with regard to the quantification of numbers of objects, in particular, I have relied heavily upon Alison Petch’s excellent work.