September 2009 to end August 2012

The Rethinking Pitt-Rivers project was made more exciting, collaborative and wonderful by the generous support of many fellow researchers, students and friends all of whom devoted many hours of work to make this project as successful as it can be. The core team of workers are more grateful than they can express to everyone else who contributed to this hugely enjoyable project. Without their help the project could not have achieved all it did, or done it nearly so well.

Core Team

Jeremy Coote Joint Head of Collections (Africa and Oceania), Pitt Rivers Museum. Primary Investigator for the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers project.
Alison Petch Researcher for the project, registrar of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

Web design and technical support

Dan Burt
Haas Ezzet

We are grateful to Haas for providing day-to-day support to the research and the project, and to Dan for managing to resurrect the site after a particularly bad incidence of multiple back-up systems failing simulaneously, as well as devising many excellent solutions to technical problems, and designing such a good website.

Scanning of Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum's Pitt-Rivers papers, general research

Rachel McGoff, 2009-2012 (scanning June-August 2011)

Typing of the Chapman thesis 'Ethnology in the Museum'

Katharine Burt

Associate Special Researcher throughout the 3 years of the project

Peter Rivière

Other Associate Researchers and Volunteers

Jasmine Aslan
Katy Barrett
Flora Boros
Mark Bowden
Kirstie Braithwaite
Loredana Burt
Bill Chapman
Sria Chatterjee
Martha Ellis Leach
Jane Ellis-Schon 
Chris Gosden
Christa Gray
Corinna Gray
Adrian Green
Gabrielle (Kathy-Anne) Hughes
Sue Johnson
Jozie Kettle
Frances Larson
Charlotte Lintern
Arthur MacGregor
Brian Martens
Chris Morton
Farah Qureshi
Anthony Pitt-Rivers
Venya da Silva
Alice Stevenson
Chris Wingfield

We are particularly grateful, in no particular order, to:

Anthony Pitt-Rivers for his support, for responding so generously to questions posed by the research team, and for donating two portraits, and an (extremely timely) set of Pitt-Rivers' notebooks to the Pitt Rivers Museum

to Rachel McGoff, Corinna Gray, Jasmine Aslan, Jozie Kettle, Venya da Silva and Gabrielle Hughes for devoting so much time and effort to proofreading the transcriptions of the Cambridge University Library 2nd collection catalogue.  To Loredana Burt who transcribed Michael Thompson's catalogue onto a new database and Flora Boros who created the PDFs from the scans prepared by Rachel McGoff of the majority of the S&SWM's Pitt-Rivers papers, and to Farah Qureshi and Christa Gray who are transcribing Pitt-Rivers' library catalogue. You can see (or will see) the fruits of their labours on this website.

to Sue Johnson who has worked very closely with the core project team to produce two exhibitions of watercolours and provided many insights into the illustrations in the catalogue of the second collection.

to Bill Chapman for allowing us to type up and provide access to his D.Phil thesis Ethnology in the Museum on this website.

to Adrian Green and Jane Ellis-Schon, of Salisbury & South Wiltshire Museum, who have been very supportive of the project. They have hosted a visit to to their museum by Alison and Jeremy, invited them to speak about the project at their founding celebration conference, arranged the loan of the very important Pitt-Rivers manuscript collection to the Pitt Rivers Museum which greatly aided the project research and also contributed generally to research and the workshops. We are also very grateful to the Trustees of the S&SWM for their support of the loan.

to the many researchers who contributed object biographies to the site, giving a range of different voices and stories as a backdrop to the life of Pitt-Rivers and his collections.

to Kate Webber for designing the project postcard (see illustration on this page) and the posters and information for Sue Johnson's exhibitions.

Finally, many thanks to Kirsty Braithwaite who proof-read the website in October 2011-March 2012 and tried to stem the tide of malapropisms, spelling errors and (particularly) grammatical mistakes. A thankless task, but it is good someone was prepared to do it. Any remaining errors are Alison and Jeremy's fault!

May 2010 / updated December 2010, February 2011 and May-June 2011, October 2011, November 2011, April 2012, September 2012.

[The images on this page show some of the people who have contributed to the project, in the final picture can be seen Flora and Farah among their fellow MAME students]