ENGLAND: THE OTHER WITHIN
Analysing the English Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum
Acquisition Events: An Overview
Chris Wingfield
Researcher 'The Other Within' project
Given the methodology described, using a database of English objects current in September 2007, it has been possible to identify 1515 acquisition events involving English objects and 796 different sources of material. These account for a total of 44 133 English objects, giving a mean collection size of approximately 29 objects at acquisition and a mean number of events per source of 1.9.
Graph 1: Distribution of sources by the number of acquisition events
However these numbers are not particularly revealing since a very large number of people were involved in only a single acquisition event, and a very small number were involved in a great many acquisition events. The museum’s first curator, Henry Balfour, who worked there from 1884 until his death in 1939 was involved in 104 acquisition events of English material, the largest number, and a considerable outlier in the distribution (See Graph 1). It should be noted that these are events in which he is the source of the material, and not events in which he participated as an employee of the museum. The next highest number of acquisition events associated with a source is only 36.
Graph 2: Distribution of mean collection size by the number of sources
For these 796 sources, the median number of acquisition events is 1 and the median average collection size at acquisition is 2 objects. Here again, the distribution plotted in Graph 2 shows that the vast majority of individuals have a mean collection size of around 1 – meaning that most people gave a single object when they were in contact with the museum. Here again there are two considerable outliers, Archibald Bell who sold over 3000 English objects in a single transaction and Augustus Henry Lane Fox who donated over 6000 English objects as part of two donations that formed the founding collection of the museum. Both donations were predominantly made up of large numbers of English stone tools.
Graph 3: Distribution of mean collection size (Omitting top 56 values - 7%)
Graph 3 shows the lower end of Graph 2, omitting all mean collection sizes over 50 (only 7% of the total). This shows that for over half of those who have been the source of the English objects in the Pitt Rivers Museum, their contact with the museum has been limited to a donations of 1 or two objects. Figure 1 suggests that in many cases these would also have been one-off donations. On the basis of these figures we can surmise that for most donors of English material to the Pitt Rivers, their relationship with the museum was short-lived, involved little cost to themselves and was probably reasonably insignificant to the whole of their lives and the range of other relationships and transactions in which they engaged.