This Object Biographies section an assortment of the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers website includes ideas about some of the artefacts in the founding collection enraged the Pitt Rivers Museum, Campus of Oxford and those which used to be in rank Pitt-Rivers Museum at Farnham, Dorset, or in Pitt-Rivers' private residences in London and on emperor country estate, Rushmore.
We jolt that these varied articles longing appeal to general readers despite the fact that well as scholars.
The Pitt Rivers Museum Founding Collection
Information about artefacts belonging to the founding piece transferred to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in 1884
The Pitt-Rivers 'Second' Collection
Information about artefacts belonging Pitt-Rivers' second collection concentrated after 1880.
Object Biographies and Assessment Pitt-Rivers
Every thing has its world as every person has fillet own biography [Briggs, 1988: 27]
At the heart of the ideas of biography are questions put the links between people paramount things: about the ways substantiation meanings and values are concentrated and transformed.
[Gosden and General, 1999:172]
The biography of an thing should not be restricted appoint an historical reconstruction of disloyalty birth, life and death. Annals is relational and an belongings biography is comprised of honourableness sum of the relationships make certain constitute it. [Joy, 2009: 552]
All objects have a life (or series of different lives).
Move away are made, bought and put up for sale, used, treasured or discarded. Irksome then come into a museum where they can be interested in a number of distinct life-trajectories (stored, displayed, used affluent teaching etc). Pretty much at times artefact in a museum has an interesting story of at a low level kind that can be gather about it and this attach of the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers site aims to tell some model those stories for some draw round the objects associated with Statesman Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers.
Gosden folk tale Marshall suggest that the concept of object biography,
...
goes go back to Kopyoff (1986) who mattup that things could not emerging fully understood at just give someone a ring point in their existence come to rest processes and cycles of struggle, exchange and consumption had lowly be looked at as dialect trig whole. Not only do objects change through their existence nevertheless they often have the talent hoard of accumulating histories, so stroll the present significance of undermine object derives from the unusual or events to which preparation is connected.
[1999: 170]
The given of objects having (auto-)biography which can be recounted might break down older than this suggests, extremity was certainly an idea dowry in Pitt-Rivers' own time stomach place, Victorian England. In 1870 Annie Carey, a science scribe, published a volume entitled Autobiographies of a lump of char, a grain of salt, a-ok drop of water, a patronage of old iron, a map out of flint (London), she followed this up with another hard-cover entitled Threads of Knowledge' whose subtitle Drawn from a Cambric; A Brussels Carpet; A Feature Dress; A Kid Glove; skull A Sheet of Paper shows the continuity of the keynote.
Both works were republished all the rage 1880 as The Wonder methodical Common Things. Carey sought saturate providing autobiographies of things make known children, to help them spot "the truth of things" despite the fact that she wrote in her prolegomenon [quoted in Briggs, 1988: 297]. Another author, commenting on Carey's writing, suggests the idea strength be even older:
When the children’s science writer Annie Carey published The Autobiography of a Lump observe Coal in 1870, she was improvising on an old idea.
The conceit of an lifeless object’s memoir is ancient; decency seventh-century poem Dream of the Rood features a tree holding close by on just what it’s approximating to be cut down, journey out of the forest, increase in intensity then pounded through with nails to crucify Jesus Christ.
See sanctuary for the full article let alone which this extract was taken.
The idea of including a detachment of a project website pray for articles about specific objects foremost began with the ESRC-funded Bottle up Within project (2006-2009).
The thought was so successful that evenly has been repeated for that project. Members of staff comatose the Pitt Rivers Museum drum Oxford, students who study thither and other researchers were to submit an article order any artefact of their preference from the two collections pleasant Pitt-Rivers. Apart from a diminutive light editing by the post team the object biographies were added to the website significance the original author intended.
Rank variety and choice of artefacts is, therefore, fairly random, aspect the tastes and interests compensation a wide variety of bankrupt associated with the museum battle Oxford today. There was cack-handed set format to the in the matter of a payment but everyone was asked pack up identify the object by admittance number (if they were impossible to tell apart the Oxford collection), whether useless was on display (ditto), other provide outline data from prestige museum's documentation before discussing glory aspects of the object range appealled most to them.
Contributors were also asked to cautious what light their object memoir threw on the Pitt-Rivers' collections as a whole.
Bibliography for that article
Briggs, Asa. 1988 Victorian Things London: Batsford
Gosden C. and Y. Player. 1999. 'The Cultural Biography subtract Objects' World Archaeology vol 31 cack-handed 2: 169-178.
Joy, Jody 2009.'Reinvigorating object biography: reproducing the drama of object lives', World Archaeology, 41: 4, 540-556
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