Pitt-Rivers in Kent

image: an example of the rare money of Matilda, struck by the moneyer Sweting at Oxford. This coin was excavated from Castle Hill, Folkestone by Pitt-Rivers in 1878, misidentified by him as a coin of Stephen, and appears not to have been passed to the Pitt Rivers Museum by the General when he donated his collection in 1884. Through another route, however, the coin came to the Ashmolean Museum, where it is now held. The full story is explored in the 'Pitt-Rivers an Kent' paper below.

We have published a draft of our first Excavating Pitt-Rivers project report today. The full paper, on Pitt-Rivers' fieldwork in the county of Kent, is published online here - and the opening lines are below. We actively encourage comments on this paper from researchers with knowledge of the history and archaeology of Kent, who can help us to add to the details that we have been able to assemble so far - please email comments to dan.hicks@prm.ox.ac.uk

This paper explores the evidence for General Augustus Pitt-Rivers’ archaeological fieldwork in the county of Kent, with particular attention to using the archaeological material from the founding collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM), University of Oxford – which has been documented through the Arts Council England-funded  Excavating Pitt-Rivers project – as a primary source.  A major aim of the project is to demonstrate the potential for museumcollections to represent resources for the writing, and re-writing, of the history of science, using 19th-century archaeological activities of General Pitt-Rivers as a case study.

Continue reading this paper at http://www.academia.edu/3071375/Pitt-Rivers_in_Kent 

Pitt-Rivers in the Isle of Thanet

Image: Photograph (2013) and illustration (1869) of the flints excavated and collected from the Isle of Thanet (Kent, England) by General Pitt-Rivers.

The Excavating Pitt-Rivers team is currently working on the material that the General collected and excavated during his time in Kent. Whilst looking at material from the Isle of Thanet we found a number of lithics, previously unrecorded, that match illustrations in one of Lane Fox’s earliest publications (Lane-Fox 1869), as shown in the photograph above, which is reproduced alongside the 1869 illustration.

In this 1869 publication, he described his ‘examination’ of the Isle of Thanet. Pitt-Rivers explored an area stretching from ‘a mile north of Margate to Broadstairs and Ramsgate, and to a distance of a mile or two inland from those places’. The paper described his methods of identifying ancient flints:

“…there is no real difficulty in detecting the ancient from the modern flakes; dark flakes with a dull surface must be rejected as modern, those of ancient date are of a light blue colour on their fractured surfaces.” (Lane-Fox 1869: 6-7)

The paper also discussed the sourcing of raw materials and the importance of understanding this. He compared his finds of flint objects in Oxfordshire to those found on the Isle of Thanet, contrasting the lack of available flint sources in Oxfordshire with their relative abundance in Kent.

Keep an eye out in the upcoming weeks for more exciting finds from Kent, as our documentation process continues.

References
Lane-Fox, A. 1869. 'On some flint implements found associated with Roman remains in Oxfordshire and the Isle of Thanet.' Journal of the Ethnological Society of London (1869-1870), 1.1: 1-12.