The Pitt Rivers Museum

The Pitt Rivers Museum is an underrated gem. Hidden in the same building as the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the museum was founded in 1884. Augustus Pitt Rivers, who donated his private collection to the University of Oxford, insisted that a permanent lecturer in anthropology must be appointed at the university. Even today, the museum staff are involved in teaching anthropology and archaeology at the University.

Over three floors, the museum houses cabinet upon cabinet of objects and curiosities (half a million of them, to be exact) donated by scholars, explorers, and missionaries. The collection is arranged typologically, according to how the objects were used, rather than according to their age or origin location. This organisational layout owes a lot to the theories of Pitt Rivers himself, who intended for his collection to show the progression of human culture and design from the simple to the complex. Today, the Pitt Rivers Museum cares for one of the world’s great collections of anthropology and world archaeology.