Blackwood and technology

Blackwood and Technology

Alison Petch, Researcher 'The Other Within' project with Frances Larson and Chantal Knowles

Beatrice Blackwood 1998.356.1

Blackwood 1950 'Technology', Frontespiece

Blackwood 1950 'Technology', Figure 1: Adze terms

Blackwood 1950 'Technology', Plate VIII, Making stone-headed club

Harold Burnham and Beatrice Blackwood standing in front of Wayland's Smithy 1998.271.75

The Pitt Rivers Museum has always had female students enrolled on its Diploma courses (one of the first two students was female, Barbara Freire Marreco) but the first female paid (as opposed to volunteering) member of staff was Beatrice Blackwood who joined the staff in the 1930s and worked in the Museum until her death in 1975 (though, latterly, as a volunteer). Like all the members of staff at the Museum at that time she was greatly interested in technologies and materials, particularly as reflected in her fieldwork in the Pacific. This webpage explores her life and work as it relates to technology and materials.

Beatrice Mary Blackwood

Blackwood was born in 1889 in Marylebone, London, the eldest of three children of James Blackwood, a publisher. She was educated at Wycombe House School and Paddington and Maida Vale high school. In 1908 she won a scholarship to Somerville College to study English language and literature. She was awarded a second class honours degree in 1912. In 1916-8 Blackwood returned to Oxford to study for the Diploma in anthropology, for which she was awarded a distinction. She was taught by Henry Balfour, Arthur Thomson and Robert Ranulph Marett. She then went to work for Arthur Thomson, Dr Lee's professor of human anatomy, at the University Museum (of Natural History). In 1924, as a Laura Spelman Rockefeller scholar, she undertook three years fieldwork into the links between intelligence and physical type in North America. She was promoted a Departmental Demonstrator in human anatomy.

In the early 1930s she visited the Pacific, especially Buka and Bougainville in the Solomon Islands. In 1936, changes in the staffing structure of the Human Anatomy Department meant that Blackwood transferred to the Pitt Rivers Museum as University Demonstrator in Ethnology. At the same time, she left for a second extended field-trip in the Pacific, in the Papuan gulf, New Britain and the north cost of New Guinea.

She returned to Oxford in 1938, a year later Henry Balfour (the first Curator of the museum) died and Tom Penniman was appointed to replace him. Blackwood had worked with Penniman in the Human Anatomy Department and they became close friends and colleagues, united in their love and knowledge of the Museum's collections and their dislike of Radcliffe-Brown's type of social anthropology. However, Blackwood's fieldwork did receive outside recognition, she was awarded the Rivers’ Memorial Medal in 1943 by the Royal Anthropological Institute for her exemplary fieldwork.

She continued as Department Demonstrator at the Museum until 1959 she formally retired at the age of 70, but she continued to come into the Museum every day to work almost until her death in 1975.

Blackwood's interest in technology and materials

As Blackwood was taught by Henry Balfour she is likely to have been introduced to technology and materials very early on in her anthropological career. Certainly, even when she was supposed to be researching into human anatomy problems she took time out to research more material subjects. In 1926-7 she took time to examine how Acoma pueblo people made 'paper bread' in the south-west United States (her notes on this are held in the PRM manuscript collections: Blackwood papers Box 13). On the same trip she also made friends with Maria Chino, considered to be the best Acoma potter, and they must have discussed pottery, when she left Maria gave her some particularly fine pieces of pottery, which were later passed to the Pitt Rivers Museum.

On her second field trip, to the Pacific, she also collected artefacts for the Museum and interested herself in finding out more about techniques and technology. For example, on 23 June 1930 she travelled to Malasang on Bougainville to see pottery making (she collected some pots and the tools that were used to make them for Balfour [BB box 2, letter 23, 29 June 1930]). This fieldwork was written up as the book Both Sides of Buka Passage: an ethnographic study of social, sexual, and economic questions in the north-western Solomon Islands which was published by the Clarendon Press in 1935. Given that her work had been funded by the Committee for Research on the Problems of Sex, it is not surprising that most of the first half of the book dealt with marriage, sex relations, pregnancy and childbirth, and male and female adolescence. However, there were two sizeable chapters on material culture: ‘Useful Arts’ and ‘Aesthetic Arts’, which she included at Balfour and Thomson’s suggestion.

Her third period of fieldwork was also in the Pacific. This time her primary objective was to collect artefacts and data for the Museum. Although she had agreed the areas she should visit with Balfour she was forced, by local circumstances, to change her itinerary once in the Pacific. Writing to Balfour though she explained the virtue of some of her choices in terms of technology:

I now feel that I was justified in coming inland, in spite of all the expenses + difficulties I might have avoided by settling on the coast. This really is a Stone Age culture – the few plane irons + knives they now have made no appreciable difference to their mode of life except to speed up a few operations. They haft and use the plane irons exactly as they do stone adzes. (BB box 19, letter to Balfour, 1 February 1937).

However, she did bear Balfour's tastes in mind:

I would like to go back to the Kukukukus, but as I am now working for the Pitt-Rivers Museum I think Balfour would rather I went somewhere more profitable from the point of view of material culture. I have covered that side of Kukukuku [Anga] life – the easiest to study – pretty thoroughly, I think, including the technique of making stone implements which Balfour particularly wanted, so from his point of view it would not be worth while going back. He does not care about social anthropology.’ (BB box 19, letter to Chinnery, 27 June 1937)

When going on journeys during her fieldwork, she usually only took a rucksack and stayed with locals in their houses when visited. She strongly disagreed with the practice of ‘going on field trips even of short duration, accompanied by a string of porters carrying furniture, tucker boxes and such paraphernalia of civilisation’, because she realized that these things established a barrier between the anthropologist and their subjects (BB uncatalogued correspondence, undated lecture on ‘Field Studies’). She advocated making friends with local children, which was often a good way of getting to know their parents, and she took balloons, little bells, small mirrors and tinsel into the field to charm them. She quickly realized that finding out about technology and material culture was a good way of starting relationships. She believed it was vital to learn the language, and criticized the practice of using interpreters which increased the likelihood of errors, and was slow and frustrating.

She had by now gained quite a lot of field-work experience of other people's lives and ways of making things. When she returned to Oxford in 1938 she was quickly involved in teaching and the day-to-day museum jobs. On top of the routine cataloguing work, Blackwood, Penniman and their colleagues tried to, ‘catch up with some of the work which has got badly into arrears owing to Balfour’s long illness and his habit of trying to do everything himself’ (PRM manuscript collections, Blackwood General Correspondence T-Z, letter to Wilson Wallis, 16 May 1940). Once Penniman had replaced Balfour their attention turned to the necessary modernisation of museum documentation. Penniman had the idea of creating a complete card index for the Museum’s collections in 1939 when he became Curator and discovered that the accessions books were the only standard record filled in for material entering the collections. He and Blackwood discussed the issue and, ‘both of us set out on the enormous task of putting on cards, in duplicate, all the entries from the beginning in 1881 until 1939. Since then I have kept the cards up to date as nearly as possible and have been solely responsible for their arrangement in the appropriate places – but the original idea was T.K.P.’s and the credit should go to him.’ (PRM ms collections, Blackwood papers, letter to ‘Jocelyn’, 6 May 1973)

One of Blackwood's rôles after 1938 was to support people coming to the Museum on research visits, as well as cataloguing and researching the collections for herself. As this account from a Museum Annual Report shows this role not only acquainted her with the depth and breadth of the large collection but also gave her an opportunity to pass that knowledge on:

Among its many services for students outside the University the Museum received Miss Barbara Hoather, Head of the Weaving Department of the Bromley College of Art, and her colleague Miss Mitchell, with eight of their students, for about a fortnight, during which they worked on textiles selected by Miss Blackwood, from many parts of the world, and used our publication of the McDougall Collection as a text-book, with the examples before them. [Annual Report 1948-9]

Blackwood considered herself to be an ethnologist, according to a paper she wrote in 1942 for the English Folk Dance and Song Society. She believed that ethnology was:

... the application of any or all of the methods of Anthropology to the comparative study of races or peoples ... [Blackwood, 1942: 89]

She believed that, 'to the ethnologist, the form of the plough is of just as much interest as the rites practised by the ploughman, since its technical details may throw light on the stage of development of the people using it, and possibly on their relations with other groups, past or present'. [Blackwood, 1942: 90] It seems that, like Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, she was a firm believer in the suggestion that technology was closely related to 'evolution'. However, in a footnote to her 1942 publication she gives a very complex reasoning about simplicity and complexity in social organization and material culture which is worth quoting in full to give a flavour of her beliefs:

Here I should perhaps explain that "primitive" does not mean "simple" for many of the societies thus described are highly complex. Neither does it mean "inferior". One of the first ideas of which an ethnologist has to rid himself is that the culture of "primitive" peoples is necessarily on a plane below his own. Again, to describe a culture as primitive is not to imply that it is at an early or immature stage of development. I agree whole-heartedly with Douglas and D'Harnoncourt that "our tendency to deal with unfamiliar manifestations of other cultures by describing them with one ambiguous and usually somewhat derogatory term is quite unfortunate." (Indian Art of the United Statess, p. 12) It is difficult, however, to find another single word or a convenient short phrase to describe what the the ethnologist means by "primitive". "Savage", which was in vogue during the nineteenth century, cannot be divorced from the idea of wildness or fierceness, quite alien to many of the peoples in question, and in any case irrelevant. Perhaps ethnologists may be allowed to use the word "primitive" if they state clearly that it is merely a convenient blanket term to include all forms of culture other than those of the great European and Oriental civilizations and their offshoots, and will be thus used in this paper.
Another point should perhaps be made clear, although for most ethnologists the issue has been decided beyond the realms of controversy. No field worker who has lived for any length of time in a "primitive" community has any doubt of the fact that the mental processes of all human beings are fundamentally alike. The "pre-logical" stage assumed for the savage by Lèvy-Bruhl and others of his school has no existence in fact. If a train of thought or reasoning, or a sequence of actions, does not conform to an investigator's or the reader's ideas of what is logical, that is because he either has not understood, or does not accept, the premisses on which it is based. [Blackwood, 1942: 91]

In 1944 she read a paper to the Oxford Social Sciences Association which stated:

Study of technology: ‘includes the study of the origin, development, geographical distribution and variation of the arts and industries of mankind. No useful purpose is served, as far as the anthropologist is concerned, by investigating [replaces original text: We do not want, however, for our purposes to investigate] or collecting examples of the various models, say, of the Baby Austin, or the cups and saucers which used to be sold at Woolworth’s. We take as our province, arts and industries, ‘from the earliest times to the age of mass production’. This includes the products of individual craftsmanship that may survive in our own and other European countries, as well as those of peoples of cultures other than our own. From the historical point of view, such studies can be made to throw much light on the contacts, and sometimes one the movements, of groups which have no written history, especially where archaeology fails us, although such evidence must be used with caution. At present time, it has sometimes been found useful in trying to induce a primitive people to make some adjustment in their lives which has become inevitable or may be to their advantage. A tool used by a group a little more highly developed than themselves has been found more suitable for them, because more easily understood + more willingly adopted, than one of our own more complex implements.

A typescript copy of this paper is held in the PRM manuscript collections Blackwood papers box 21.

Blackwood's publications

As can be seen from the list of her publications at the end of this page, several of Blackwood's articles and papers deal specifically with technology and materials, for example

1940. ‘Crafts of a Stone Age People in Central New Guinea’ in Man, vol 40, p. 11

1941. ‘Some Arts and Industries of New Guinea and New Britian’ in Man, vol. 41, p. 88

1950. ‘Reserve Dyeing in New Guinea’ in Man, vol 50. pp. 53-55

But her major contributions to the literature were probably those published by the Museum itself and discussed below. Note that she mostly confined her publications to discussion of New Guinea technology and materials though her general museum work, and archaeological experience, will have meant that she was well versed in other cultures' material arts and industries.

1. Technology of a Modern Stone-Age People in New Guinea
As the Annual Report for 1948-9 puts it:

Miss Blackwood’s Technology of a Modern Stone-Age People in New Guinea went to press as the third of our Occasional Papers on Technology, edited by the Curator and herself, and published by the Museum. ... Miss Blackwood’s expedition on behalf of the Museum shortly before the Second World War was specifically for collecting for the Museum and for observing and recording technological processes. Some publication has already appeared in the Proceedings of the Sixth Pacific Science Congress, in the Geographical Journal, and in Folk-Lore, and the Museum possess her films of making stone implements and other processes which have been shown at congresses and meetings of learned Societies. But the war, and the urgent calls of a heavy teaching programme and of research workers, of the Regional Catalogue and the library of lantern slides, as well as finance, have caused us to wait until now to publish her specimens and an account of their making and uses. The book will contain about 40 pages of text, 16 pages of half-tone plates from photographs taken by Miss Blackwood on the expedition, and 19 line-drawings made by Mr. I.M. Allen of our Technical Staff from Miss Blackwood’s collection.

The following year, in the next Annual Report, Penniman reported:

Miss Blackwood’s Technology of a Modern Stone-Age People in New Guinea has been published as the third of our Occasional Papers on Technology, with 60 pages of text, 16 pages and frontispiece of half-tone plates by the author, and 19 text-figures drawn under her direction by Mr. I.M. Allen. It gives an account of the methods used by a modern Stone-Age people in making their stone and other tools, weapons, and articles of domestic use, as observed and photographed by the writer during nine months’ residence in their villages in 1936-7 while on an expedition to collect specimens and observe and record their uses and the methods of making them for the Museum. It continues our method of presenting technological processes in such a way that the reader, given suitable materials, could repeat the work, and obtain the results described.

This was the first of her three publications by the Museum, her first in the Occasional Papers on Technology series. The paper was actually published in 1950. It was described in the preface as

The present paper gives an account of the methods used by a modern Stone-Age people in making their tools, weapons, and articles of domestic use, as observed and photographed by the writer during nine months' residence in their villages in 1936-7. [Blackwood, 1950: 3]

Blackwood received technical advice from various people in the Geology Department of the University Museum (of Natural History), and Sir Francis Knowles, 'Valuable suggestions by ... Knowles are incorporated in the section on adzes, on which he is an expert'. [Blackwood, 1950: 4] In addition, 'Mr David Nutt, of Salter's Boatbuilding Yard, Oxford, demonstrated the use of an adze in his work, and lent tools for comparison. A chair maker's adze in the High Wycombe Public Library and Museum was examined and measured ...' [Blackwood, 1950: 4]

The contents of her paper:

Chapter 1: The country and the people
Chapter 2: Tools: 1. Stone bladed adze 2. Bark-cloth beater 3. Other tools
Chapter 3: Weapons: 1. Stone-headed clubs 2. Wooden clubs 3. Bows and arrows 4. Shields
Chapter 4: Domestic Crafts: 1. Fire-making 2. String and netting 3. Costume and personal ornaments
Chapter 5: Conclusions

Each tool or weapon is described exactly, the rocks from which it was made identified, the process by which it was made described, variations explained, the process of hafting (if required) described, and recent changes to traditional form spotted by Blackwood described, the use of the tool or weapon was explained and comparative forms discussed.

She concluded:

In the foregoing chapters are described all the industries practised by the Kukukuku. In comparison with those of the Neolithic period in Europe, and also with those of other groups in New Guinea, they are poor and few. Geography accounts for some of these omissions, but not for all. In precipitous country, with tumbling mountain streams, no form of water transport is possible. As elsewhere in Melanesia, land transport is solely on foot and the only burden-bearer is the human back. Bark-cloth supplies as much protection against the weather as is required, and in any case one would not expect to find any form of weaving in New Guinea. There is a plentiful supply of materials suitable for baskets, but none are made; the string bags which take their place are, however, well adapted for use under conditions where it is often necessary to have both hands free. Whether there is any clay in the area suitable for pottery I do not know; the Kukukuku are completely ignorant of it. Bamboo supplies their few needs for water-tight containers.
Bamboo supplies also their few needs for musical instruments. They have a bamboo jews-harp, a bamboo syrinx, and a bamboo flageolet. These are all of types similar to those found in other parts of New Guinea. ... The most surprising, and to an ethnologist most disappointing feature of Kukukuku culture is the almost complete absence of decorative art, especially in wood-working. Except for the arrow-shaft markings, no attempt is made to embellish any object by carving even the simplest design, nor are any figures produced. In this respect they offer a sharp contrast to every other group in New Guinea of which reports are available. It cannot be for lack of opportunity; trees are plentiful, and their equipment is not less adequate than that of others. One possible explanation is that they are not interested, as people must be when, like the Bosmun I afterwards visited on the Ramu River, they carve an animal's head on a simple food pounder for ordinary everyday use. Another may be that Kukukuku religion does not call for masks, ancestor figures, or other ritual objects such as those which play an essential part in the life of the people of the Papuan Gulf, as described by F.E. Williams in Drama of Orokolo.

This publication was discussed by Johnson:

Although not experimental, this report provides grist for the experimental mill (the "knapping" styles described are very similar to those elicited by White ... in the 1960s). [Johnson, 1978: 350]

2. The classification of artefacts in the Pitt Rivers Museum Oxford
Her second Occasional Paper on Technology was published in 1970 as number 11 in the series. The preface explains:

The present publication has proved useful, in typescript, to members of the staff and others working in the Museum, and though it was primarily designed for this purpose, requests for copies are not infrequently received from visitors. The suggestion has been made that its contents would be of interest to a wider circle of museum workers and others, we therefore decided to publish it as Number 11 of our Occasional Papers on Technology. [Blackwood, 1970: preface]

However, this paper was not really about technology per se. It concerned the ways that staff had classified or catalogued artefacts into intellectual hierarchies in order to retrieve information about them in the displays, and the card catalogues which Blackwood and Penniman had spent so long preparing (which were, in turn, the forerunner for the classifications used in the collections management computerised database used today by Museum staff).

The paper contained an introduction which discussed the 'Origin and Development of the Pitt Rivers Museum', Notes on the catalogues of accessions, Classification of Artefacts, and Index to Classifications. It is true that because this work has formed the basis for documentation practise in the Museum since it was first written it has continued to be one of the most seminal works in the series.

The introduction to the volume makes it clear how technology was part of the founding intentions of the Museum:

Colonel Lane Fox, as he then was, [explained] the ideas and methods underlying his principles of classification ...
The collection does not contain any considerable number of unique specimens, and has been collected ... not for the purpose of surprising any one, either by the beauty or value of the objects exhibited, but solely with a view to instruction. For this purpose, ordinary and typical specimens, rather than rare objects, have been selected and arranged in sequence, so as to trace, as far as practicable, the succession of ideas by which the minds of men in a primitive condition of culture have progressed from the simple to the complex, and from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. [Blackwood, 1970: 7-8]

3. The Kukukuku of the Upper Watut
Blackwood's third Museum publication was posthumous, published in 1978, three years after her death, as No. 2 of the monograph series. It was edited from her published articles, and unpublished field notes by C.R. Hallpike. Cranstone (the fourth Curator of the Museum) remarked, in the preface, 'It was always clear, and a matter of regret, that in her 'Technology of a Modern Stone Age People', so thorough and comprehensive, within the limitations of the scope which she imposed on herself, she could have published only a part of the mass of valuable material contained in her diaries and field notes. She herself, a perfectionist, perhaps felt that her information on any one topic was insufficiently complete; but scholars throughout the world will be glad that it is now accessible to them. [Blackwood, 1978: xiii]

Hallpike in his introduction states: 'While she regarded the Kukukuku expedition as an opportunity of making a detailed study of a Neolithic technology ...', she experienced some practical and security problems working in the area. [Blackwood, 1978: 8]

He makes the point that her intention to research and collect examples of material culture showing technology did affect her ability to research other more social aspects of local culture:

Kukukuku social organisation, being extremely fluid and formless, even by New Guinea standards, was too intractable to be satisfactorily analysed in the short time (less than 9 months) which was all Miss Blackwood was able to spend. In addition, the unsuitability of Manki village, and her interest in the technology and responsibility for obtaining specimens from the different groups in the area, necessitated periods of residence in several villages, and this inevitably made investigation of the social organisation much more difficult than would have been the case if she had been able to spend all her time in her second place of residence, Andarora. [Blackwood, 1978: 9]

He also remarks that

She did not return to the Kukukuku again since, while she recognised that her study of them was far from complete ... she considered that her primary responsibility to the Pitt Rivers Museum was in the study of technology and the collection of artefacts, a task which she had already accomplished most creditably. [Blackwood, 1978: 9-10]

Although the publication was not part of the Occasional Papers on Technology it did discuss some relevant topics:

Chapter 2 Material Culture
1. Lack of artistic development
2. Dress and personal adornment
3. The manufacture of string and netting
4. Fire-making
5. The uses of bamboo
6. Tobacco and tobacco pipes
7. Betel chewing and the preparation of lime
8. Tools (i) Stone bladed adzes (ii) bark cloth (iii) other tools
9. Weapons (i) Bows and arrows (ii) Stone-headed clubs (iii) Wooden clubs (iv) Shields

and

Appendices
I How Pinga built a new house
II Description of micro-sections used in making stone adze-blades by Dr J.V. Harrison
III The use of plants

Acknowledgements
My thanks to Fran Larson, whose data on Blackwood (written up for the Relational Museum project), I have ruthlessly plundered. In addition, thanks to Chantal Knowles, National Museums of Scotland who has also reviewed her research notes and passed on much useful information.

ENGLAND: THE OTHER WITHIN

Analysing the English Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum