Past exhibitions | Pitt Rivers Museum

Portrait of an Angami Naga man named ‘Dotsoll’, depicted standing, holding two spears and a shield. Watercolour painting by Robert Gosset Woodthorpe. Dated 19 April 1874.

12 November 2018 – 19 May 2019

Surveying the Nagas: Visual Representations of India’s Northern Hill-Tribes in the R. G. Woodthorpe Collection

This display presented a selection of material from the Pitt Rivers Museum’s R. G. Woodthorpe collection, much of which has never before been on public view.

Archive Case (First Floor)

Beaded hide skirt with hide tassels. The skirt was made prior to 1940 and would have been worn during the Marmo ritual initiating young Iraqw girls into womanhood.

29 October 2018 – 11 March 2019

A Tradition Continued: Iraqw Beaded Skirts Old and New

Iraqw skirts are amongst the most elaborately decorated textiles from eastern Africa. Each skirt is unique, the design being a product of the skill of the individual maker and the resources available.

Didcot Case (Lower Gallery)

Beatrice Blackwood taking a photograph during her fieldwork in Yoho Valley, British Columbia, Canada, in 1925. Photographer unknown.

15 October 2018 – 11 March 2019

Intrepid Women: Fieldwork in Action, 1910–1957

This exhibition focused on six of the Pitt Rivers Museum’s most important female collectors and their fieldwork carried out between 1910 and the late 1950s.

Special Exhibition Gallery

Kesang Ball. Photograph by Nyema Droma. 2018 (Copyright Nyema Droma/Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford)

13 October 2018 – 30 May 2019

Performing Tibetan Identities: Photographic Portraits by Nyema Droma

The Tibetan photographer Nyema Droma, taking inspiration from the Museum’s historic collections, created portraits of other young Tibetans that celebrate their experience and challenge stereotypes.

Installation in Court & Long Gallery

Votive object (Tibetan: tsa-tsa) depicting Palden Lhamo. Acquired by Augustus Pitt-Rivers before 1884 and donated as part of the Pitt Rivers Museum founding collection.

31 August 2018 – 25 January 2019

Tibetan Objects in Transition

The material culture of Tibet has been sought, collected and studied in the West since the middle of the nineteenth century.

Display Case C.56.A (Court)

Woman of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) (name unknown), engraved for publication by James Caldwell after an original drawing by William Hodges.

28 May – 23 September 2018

‘A Variety of Portraits of Persons’: From the Official Account of Cook’s Second Voyage to the Pacific (1772–1775)

The eighteen prints displayed here were from a copy of ‘A Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World’. This was the official account of James Cook’s second famous voyage to the Pacific, from 1772 to 1775.

Archive Case (First Floor)

Pigeon whistle, being a type of Aeolian flute; when attached to a flying bird, it formed part of an aerial orchestra.

24 November 2017 – 4 March 2018

Pigeon Whistles: An Orchestra in Flight

This was a project by composer Nathaniel Mann who, intrigued by the Museum’s collection of pigeon whistles on display, devised a work that involved homing pigeons carrying music across the country.

Puppet Case (Lower Gallery)

(Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford)

20 February – 15 May 2017

Oxfordshire Folklore and Customs: Celebrating the Centenary of Antiquarian and Folklorist Percy Manning

A display commemorating the centenary of the death of antiquarian and folklorist Percy Manning (1870–1917), who had a keen interest in archaeology and the history of English customs and traditions.

Didcot Case (Lower Gallery)

A man and boy holding an embroidered textile typical of the Palas valley in Kohistan district of north-western Pakistan. Photograph by Sheila Paine. Sherakot, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. 1993.

1 November 2016 – 30 April 2017

Embroidered Visions: Photographs of Central Asia and the Middle East by Sheila Paine

This exhibition presented a selection of photographs taken by textile expert Sheila Paine during her travels in Central Asia and the Middle East in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Embroidered cotton shift (incomplete). Bar Paro, Palas Valley, Kohistan, Pakistan. Instead of traditional silk, solar motifs and the protective power of the triangle are embroidered in cotton yarn.

16 August 2016 – 12 February 2017

Stitch of a Symbol – Insights into the Textile Journeys of Sheila Paine

This display followed a series of extraordinary journeys by Sheila Paine, whose aim was to discover the origins of an embroidered dress seen in a London textile dealer’s shop in the late 1980s.

Didcot Case (Lower Gallery)

Māori house (whare) with carved and painted wooden decoration. Photograph by Alfred Burton for the Burton Brothers studio (Dunedin). North Island, New Zealand. Circa 1887.

30 November 2015 – 6 March 2016

Burton Bros. of Dunedin: Photographs of New Zealand and Fiji by a Late Nineteenth-Century Commercial Studio

This display presented twenty-six mounted albumen prints by the Burton Brothers studio of Dunedin, New Zealand.

Archive Case (First Floor)

Interior view of the Pitt Rivers Museum, looking towards the east end of the Court, showing the Haida totem pole (‘Star House Pole’). Photograph by Alfred Robinson. Oxford, England. 1901.

9 June – 28 September 2014

Star House Pole: Early Images of the Haida Totem Pole in the Pitt Rivers Museum

This display presented a selection of historic images – including photographs, drawings and published material – relating to the Haida totem pole on display in the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Archive Case (First Floor)

Hand-coloured studio portrait of a Saami woman, identified as a wife (or married woman), standing, wearing a distinctive hat. Photograph by the Marcus Selmer studio. Bergen, Norway. Circa 1873.

29 April – 1 September 2013

Travels in Finland and Bosnia-Herzegovina: An Ethnographic Collection of Sir Arthur Evans

This display presented a selection of twenty-three drawings, sketches and photographs by the archaeologist Sir Arthur J. Evans (1851–1941).

Archive Case (First Floor)

A mounted muleteer, one of a series of Brazilian types from Rio de Janeiro.

21 January – 21 April 2013

Brazil, Chile, Peru, 1829–32: A Naval Surgeon’s Costumbrismo Collection

This collection of watercolours was given to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1933 by a Miss Wakefield. It contains fine examples of costumbrismo, a genre of painting with Spanish origins that became popular in South America in the early 19th century.

Archive Case (First Floor)

Zoomorph B (also known as Monument 2), south face, dated AD 780. Photograph by Alfred Maudslay. Quirigua, Guatemala. 1883.

16 April – 2 September 2012

Reading the Ruins: Alfred Maudslay and the Maya Site of Quirigua, Guatemala

This display presented ten mounted prints by Alfred Percival Maudslay (1850–1931), known as the father of Mesoamerican archaeology, alongside related material concerning his pioneering work during the early 1880s at the Maya site of Quirigua.

Archive Case (First Floor)

This image shows the depth of Garrod’s excavations in the final 1934 season at Tabun.

26 September 2011 – 8 January 2012

A Pioneer of Prehistory: Dorothy Garrod and the Caves of Mount Carmel

This display presented seventeen photographs from the collection of the archaeologist Dorothy Garrod (1892–1968), which was given to the Pitt Rivers Museum by her friend and executor Suzanne Cassou de Saint Mathurin in 1986.

Archive Case (First Floor)

Rentarō Tanaka. Photograph by Jacques-Philippe Potteau. Paris, France. 1864.

11 April – 18 September 2011

The Last Samurai: Jacques-Philippe Potteau’s Photographs of the Japanese Missions to Europe, 1862 and 1864

This display presented fourteen mounted albumen prints and two related engravings from the important Takenouchi mission to Europe (1862) and the Ikeda mission to France (1864).

Archive Case (First Floor)

Multi-storeyed houses in Taos Pueblo, a settlement which has been inhabited for over six centuries and is the northernmost of the Rio Grande pueblos. Photograph by John Hillers. Taos, New Mexico, United States of America. 1880.

22 November 2010 – 27 March 2011

Among the Pueblos: John K. Hillers (1843–1925), Photographer of the American Southwest

This display presented eighteen original albumen prints by John Karl Hillers (1843–1925), pioneer photographer of the American Southwest.

Archive Case (First Floor)

Embroidered cotton gown, kusaibi. Made in Liberia or a neighbouring area of Sierra Leone or Guinea before 1846.

19 September 2010 – 6 November 2011

Costume of a King

A display of a gown that was found in the Museum's textile store without any documentation in 1974. It turned out to be much more important than just ‘probably West African, possibly Nigerian’, as it was identified then.

Didcot Case (Lower Gallery)

View of an escarpment near Magdala, with a boy standing on rocks in the foreground. Tanta, Ethiopia. Photograph by Wilfred Thesiger. 1960.

4 June 2010 – 5 June 2011

Wilfred Thesiger in Africa: A Centenary Exhibition

This exhibition celebrated arguably the greatest traveller of the twentieth century, and one of its greatest explorers, Sir Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003), who is most famous for his journeys in Arabia and his sojourns among the Marsh Arabs in Iraq.

Special Exhibition Gallery

Frontispiece of John F. Baddeley’s Russia, Mongolia, China: Being Some Record of the Relations Between Them from the Beginning of the XVIIth Century to the Death of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, A.D. 1602–1676, etc., 2 vols. (London, 1919).

1 May – 29 September 2009

Across the Caucasus: Photographs and Manuscripts from the John F. Baddeley Collection

This display presented a selection of photographs, manuscripts and exquisite published material by the writer and traveller John F. Baddeley (1854–1940).

Archive Case (First Floor)