The Pitts River Museum

“My favourite museum in the world!” This is what many visitors say about the Pitt Rivers Museum, with its atmospheric galleries, showing artefacts from all corners of the world, uniquely arranged according to the objects’ different functions. But who was General Pitt-Rivers, who donated the founding collection, and how did the museum come to have so distinctive an appearance? Its displays may look unchanged since Victorian times, but they are actually the outcome of a lively history, curatorial ambitions, university politics and shifts in public taste.

This book provides, in addition, an insight into the collections themselves, the cast of characters who contributed to them and the kind of adventurous collaborations that the museum today undertakes with the communities from which the collections originally came.