Technologies and Materials

The study of technologies and materials at the Pitt Rivers Museum

Introduction

Alison Petch,
Researcher 'The Other Within' project

Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers. 1998.271.66

Henry Balfour 1998.356.17.1

Thomas Kenneth Penniman

Sperm whale teeth slides

Occasional paper 'Stone-Worker's Progress' by Francis Knowles

One of the things that distinguished Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers' collections from other ethnographic and archaeological collections of the nineteenth-century was his interest in different technologies or techniques like stone-working, carving and carpentry and in the properties of different materials like stone, wood and animal products.

This interest was passed, with the founding collection, to the Pitt Rivers Museum. Staff throughout the Museum's history have been particularly interested in the ways different technologies and materials affect artefacts and the way they are made. This section of the website not only relates all the different ways that museum staff (and Pitt Rivers) have looked at technologies and materials but also at some of the implications of this research for the study of material culture.

T.K. Penniman, the second Curator of the Museum, felt that technologies were at the heart of the Museum's work:

The arrangement of large collections by subjects, with the areas in which objects are found as sub-groups within them, the original idea of General Pitt Rivers, sometimes displays the geographical variations of an art or industry, or the diffusion of an art or technique over a wide area, or the origin and development of an instrument, process, art, or industry, and on occasion may simply set out a complete technical process in the areas in which it is found, or again, show a classification of all the forms which a particular kind of instrument or object may take. Such an arrangement means that the Museum exhibitions and storage are always interacting, and cannot in all places remain static. This year, as usual, people have seen that some cases have been rearranged, others are being arranged, and some remain untouched. [Museum Annual Report 1952-3]

The extent to which this was true, in different periods, can be gauged by reading the following web-pages.

The Other Within researchers became interested in technology and materials whilst wondering if one of the reasons for the number and variety of English objects in the Pitt Rivers Museum was the range of techniques and materials which were shown by this artefacts. The following pages cover all the general research into these topics in the museum.

Techniques and technology

Pitt Rivers was interested in the evolution of technology (and, therefore, design). Staff at the museum since 1884 have been interested both in the differences within particular technologies (for example, the different ways people made fire through the ages or in different places); but also how exactly people made particular things, for example how was a stone axe made (and was it made differently at other times, or by other cultures)?

Materials

Another interest was in the raw materials. This included the analysis of particular metals to identify exactly what metals were used, or to look at particular forms of ivory or horn.