Nigerian Collections in Pitt Rivers Museum Archives, University of Oxford

Extract

Pitt Rivers Museum is one of the major anthropological museums in the world and as such has considerable object collections from Nigeria. Less known is its archive collection which contains a small but interesting collection of material relating to Nigeria. The Museum has been collecting archival material since its foundation in 1884 and the collections are still growing annually as more material is donated. At present the entire collection stands in the region of sixty manuscript collections of varying sizes and about 70,000 photographic images. The archive collections do not document specific objects in the museum collections (any material of this nature belongs with specific object records) but the broader historical and intellectual contexts which shaped anthropology in general and the Museum's collection in particular. The Nigerian material, although it is somewhat uneven, typifies this collecting policy and comprises both manuscripts and photographs.