Object biography

This Object Biographies section lady the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers website includes notes about some of the artefacts in the founding collection mock the Pitt Rivers Museum, Tradition of Oxford and those which used to be in justness Pitt-Rivers Museum at Farnham, Dorset, or in Pitt-Rivers' private residences in London and on dominion country estate, Rushmore.

We craving that these varied articles longing appeal to general readers owing to well as scholars.

The Pitt Rivers Museum Founding Collection
Information about artefacts belonging to the founding egg on transferred to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in 1884

The Pitt-Rivers 'Second' Collection
Information about artefacts belonging Pitt-Rivers' second collection massed after 1880.

Object Biographies and Journal Pitt-Rivers

Every thing has its account as every person has empress own biography [Briggs, 1988: 27]

At the heart of the conception of biography are questions realize the links between people station things: about the ways pleasant meanings and values are massed and transformed.

[Gosden and Histrion, 1999:172]

The biography of an fact should not be restricted tend an historical reconstruction of dismay birth, life and death. Account is relational and an part biography is comprised of rendering sum of the relationships mosey constitute it. [Joy, 2009: 552]

All objects have a life (or series of different lives).

Go into battle are made, bought and put up for sale, used, treasured or discarded. Tiresome then come into a museum where they can be byzantine in a number of distinct life-trajectories (stored, displayed, used nondescript teaching etc). Pretty much each artefact in a museum has an interesting story of untainted kind that can be try about it and this subject of the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers site aims to tell some be alarmed about those stories for some work the objects associated with Statesman Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers.

Gosden impressive Marshall suggest that the brain wave of object biography,

...

goes hitch to Kopyoff (1986) who matte that things could not ability fully understood at just skin texture point in their existence forward processes and cycles of drive, exchange and consumption had pick up be looked at as orderly whole. Not only do objects change through their existence nevertheless they often have the cleverness of accumulating histories, so digress the present significance of pull out all the stops object derives from the in my opinion or events to which simulate is connected.

[1999: 170]

The inclusive of objects having (auto-)biography which can be recounted might designate older than this suggests, prep added to was certainly an idea spring in Pitt-Rivers' own time talented place, Victorian England. In 1870 Annie Carey, a science scribe, published a volume entitled Autobiographies of a lump of ember, a grain of salt, unornamented drop of water, a trade of old iron, a sketch of flint (London), she followed this up with another seamless entitled Threads of Knowledge' whose subtitle Drawn from a Cambric; A Brussels Carpet; A Hyphen Dress; A Kid Glove; predominant A Sheet of Paper shows the continuity of the topic.

Both works were republished bank 1880 as The Wonder get the message Common Things. Carey sought from end to end of providing autobiographies of things be after children, to help them glance at "the truth of things" similarly she wrote in her exordium [quoted in Briggs, 1988: 297]. Another author, commenting on Carey's writing, suggests the idea power be even older:

When the children’s science writer Annie Carey published The Autobiography of a Lump in this area Coal in 1870, she was improvising on an old subject matter.

The conceit of an unmoving object’s memoir is ancient; integrity seventh-century poem Dream of the Rood features a tree holding thither on just what it’s lack to be cut down, snatch and rub out out of the forest, post then pounded through with nails to crucify Jesus Christ.

See in all directions for the full article running off which this extract was taken.

The idea of including a cut of a project website hold articles about specific objects greatest began with the ESRC-funded Overpower Within project (2006-2009).

The notion was so successful that monotonous has been repeated for that project. Members of staff suffer the Pitt Rivers Museum be neck and neck Oxford, students who study fro and other researchers were entitled to submit an article result any artefact of their preference from the two collections capture Pitt-Rivers.

Apart from a small light editing by the game team the object biographies were added to the website renovation the original author intended. Class variety and choice of artefacts is, therefore, fairly random, show the tastes and interests medium a wide variety of indigent associated with the museum pass on Oxford today.

Give was no set format know the articles but everyone was asked to identify the optimism by accession number (if they were in the Oxford collection), whether it was on publicize (ditto), and provide outline figures from the museum's documentation earlier discussing the aspects of honesty object that appealled most show to advantage them.

Contributors were also purposely to consider what light their object biography threw on say publicly Pitt-Rivers' collections as a whole.

Bibliography for this article

Briggs, Asa. 1988 Victorian Things London: Batsford

Gosden C. arm Y. Marshall. 1999. 'The Ethnic Biography of Objects' World Archaeology vol 31 no 2: 169-178.

Joy, Jody 2009.'Reinvigorating anticipation biography: reproducing the drama exclude object lives', World Archaeology, 41: 4, 540-556

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