Pitt Rivers, extraordinary museum

We drove over to Oxford today to visit my favourite museum, the very peculiar Pitt Rivers.

Named after General Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers, it’s stuck at the back of Oxford’s Natural History Museum - well worth a visit in its own right and always popular with children because of its impressive collection of dinosaurs - and is an anthropological and ethnographic museum founded on the General’s original collections. And it has shrunken heads.

I often visited the Pitt Rivers when Helen was at Oxford and we lived close to the city but I hadn’t been back for years. Stepping into the gloom - the lighting’s kept very low and the museum offers torches to help you read the hand-written explanatory cards - I could see that next to nothing had changed. The ground floor is a jumble of Victorian display cases, their contents arranged not by geography or history or culture but by theme - so, for example, the section on funerary rituals includes artifacts from Africa and a wrapper for Mrs Oliver’s funeral biscuits, from Yorkshire, with a helpful note suggesting the biscuits were possibly a faint echo of prehistoric cannabalism.

Then there are the shrunken heads. The shrunken head display always has a crowd of people pressing against it and you’ll have to wait a few minutes to get to the front. There you’ll see shrunken sloth heads (used as a replacement for a human when the murdered victim was a relative), real and ghastly shrunken human heads, each about the size of a small orange, blackened with incongruously long and seemingly healthy hair, a few human scalps and instructions on how to shrink your own heads (remove bones, stuff with wet sand and use pebbles to keep the shape).

Towering over one end of the floor is an enormous totem pole - the museum has a large number of artifacts from native Siberians, Canadian Aleuts, Inuits etc, and native Americans. One photo of a group of native Americans names the individuals, apparently at their tribe’s request but instead of noble or romantic names like Running Wolf or Sitting Bull they’re called Shot Both Sides and Coarse Hair.

In the section on Polynesian/Melanesian/Micronesian culture I was looking out for one of their sea maps - a lattice made of straw or reed or sticks representing currents, with small shells attached representing islands - but didn’t find any. Lots of models of outrigger canoes that had to keep the outrigger to the windward side when sailing which caused problems when sailing into the wind because of the need to tack, a problem solved apparently by simply swapping the bow for the stern.

It’s probably a mistake to think of the Pitt Rivers as a delightful anachronism - I’m not sure any self-respecting Victorian museum other than the Pitt Rivers would have resisted the chance to organise its collection to support a particular narrative. The Pitt Rivers doesn’t seem to tell any story except, perhaps, to suggest that all cultures do the same sort of stuff and that we’re all quite peculiar.