Qualla: Pitt Rivers Museum

Pitt Rivers Museum: Introduction

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Einsamer Schütze, CC BY-SA 3.0. You enter through the back of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, past the dinosaur skeletons, through a doorway that gives no warning of what lies beyond. Then the Pitt Rivers Museum opens up: a vast, dimly lit hall crammed with glass cases on two mezzanine levels, soaring to a vaulted ceiling, every surface dense with objects. Masks, weapons, textiles, musical instruments, amulets, boats, tools -- more than 600,000 items from every inhabited continent, arranged not by where they came from but by what they do. It is overwhelming, deeply strange, and unlike any other museum in the world.

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Image: Einsamer Schütze | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pitt Rivers Museum: The General's Gift

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0. Augustus Pitt Rivers was a Victorian military officer, an archaeologist, and an evolutionary thinker who believed that human culture could be understood the way Darwin understood biology: as a progression from the simple to the complex. In 1884, he donated his private collection ...

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Image: Geni | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pitt Rivers Museum: The Case of the Shrunken Heads

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Einsamer Schütze, CC BY-SA 3.0. For decades, the Pitt Rivers Museum was known -- to schoolchildren especially -- as the place with the shrunken heads. The tsantsas, as the Shuar people of Ecuador call them, had been on display since the 1940s, the museum's most famous and most troubling exhibits. In September 2...

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Image: Einsamer Schütze | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pitt Rivers Museum: Six Hundred Thousand Objects

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adam Hopkinson from Oxford, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. The collection has grown from Pitt Rivers's original 22,000 items to over 600,000, nearly all acquired through donation by colonial officials, travellers, scholars, and missionaries. The largest object on display is a Haida house post -- an 11-metre totem pole from the village of...

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Image: Adam Hopkinson from Oxford, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0

Pitt Rivers Museum: Reckoning with the Past

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carlos Felipe Pardo from Washington, United States, CC BY 2.0. The Pitt Rivers Museum now describes itself as "sector-leading" in its work on decoloniality, and the changes go beyond removing problematic displays. New labels incorporate the voices of artists and indigenous leaders. The Living Cultures initiative, a collaboration with a Maasa...

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Image: Carlos Felipe Pardo from Washington, United States | CC BY 2.0