ESRC Impact Accelerator Award: From Museums to the Historic Environment

Image: A selection of Bronze Age copper alloy axes from the UK and Ireland, collected by General Pitt-Rivers between c.1851 and 1881, from the founding collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum. Photograph by Carlotta Gardner, taken as part of the Excavating Pitt-Rivers project in 2013

We were delighted to receive news today that our application through the ESRC Impact Acceleration programme for funding for a pilot programme of knowledge exchange in partnership with the British Museum was successful. The programme builds directly on the documentation work, funded by an award from Arts Council England, that was undertaken on the English archaeological collections in the founding collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum in 2013. The project is led by Dan Hicks (Pitt Rivers Museum) and Dan Pett (British Museum).

The award of £28,947 will fund a pilot programme titled 'From Museums to the Historic Environment': using the Pitt-Rivers archaeological collections to explore the ways in which historic archaeological museum collections hold significant, untapped information about the historic environment of England that is of wider public value.

The project will involve enhancing our knowledge of the sites from which the archaeological objects acquired by General Pitt-Rivers derived, and exploring the wider value of this information through knowledge exchange.

Our aim is to experiment with how a range of new users across the fragmented heritage sector could benefit from knowledge generated from collections-based research into historic collections: from local government planning authorities and Historic Environment Records to archaeological contractors, community heritage groups, local historians, regional museums and national heritage agencies.

This pilot project will run during between April 2014 and October 2015. A project officer will be appointed in the first half of 2014, and a cross-sector workshop will be held in Oxford in Spring 2015. More details will be posted on the Excavating Pitt-Rivers blog as the project develops.

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.

Job Vacancy: Curatorial Assistant, Pitt Rivers Museum

Image: Handbuilt jar or cooking pot in local sandy courseware, Saxo-Norman, 11th-13th centuries AD. From an assemblage of more than 1,500 ceramic vessels and sherds held at the Pitt Rivers Museum from General Pitt-Rivers’ 1878 excavations at the site of Caesar’s Camp, Folkstone, Kent.

This vacancy has now been filled. For details of the Excavating Pitt-Rivers project, see here