The English artefacts in the Pitt Rivers Museum

The Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford is one of the foremost ethnographic museums in the world. It is known for having many thousands of objects on display from all corners of the globe, and from all periods of history. However, it does have surprisingly large collections of artefacts, photographs and manuscripts from England. This resource has been created as part of the ESRC-funded Other Within research project. The project was set up to explore the English collections and what they can now tell us and was based at the Pitt Rivers Museum of the University of Oxford between 2006 and 2009. Find out more about the research project here.

We hope that this website will prove interesting for a lot of different users. The website was created by a team of people, find out more here. The copyright for the contents of this site reside with the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

Data, Mapping and Statistics

The site makes available the English collections databases that contain information about the English archaeological and ethnographic artefacts and photographic collections at the Museum. Additionally a database giving the known information about all the individuals and institutions that contributed to the English collections is available. You can also interact with our objects, photographs, individuals and Oxfordshire databases using freetext search. You can explore the collections geographically using our maps of the English collections. Finally, read a selection of statistics about the collections created from the datbases during the research project.

Articles and object biographies

The site contains some pages containing articles about some of the interesting English objects in the collections. There are also a series of themed articles that include information about the collection of artefacts from Oxfordshire, the acquisition events which created the English collections at the Museum, information about a number of donors to the collections and information about the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Progress reports and the project Seminar Series

For an overview of the work carried out during the project go here. Find out more about a SEMINAR SERIES linked to this project which were held between January and March 2009 at the Museum here.

Final Outcomes of the project

This website is one of the major outcomes of the 'Other Within' project, and a second outcome will be a monograph written by Chris Wingfield and Chris Gosden during 2009-10. it is hoped that the book will be published in 2010-11. More information about the monograph will be made available here over time.

Please send any feedback to prm@prm.ox.ac.uk

Find out about citing the Other Within website pages here.