conference

PRIFYSGOL CYMRU ABERTAWE,
UNIVERSITY OF WALES SWANSEA.

Experimental Archaeology in the Pitt Rivers Museum

Alice Stevenson (Pitt Rivers Museum)

In 1872 a Victorian English gentleman was seen throwing a curved stick around the public park of Wormwood Scrubs in the London borough of Hammersmith. The gentleman in question was General Augustus Henry Lane Fox, later known as General Pitt Rivers, and the curved stick was a facsimile of an ancient Egyptian boomerang on display in the British Museum. As Pitt Rivers’ second biographer Mark Bowden has noted such experimental work is amongst his great achievements and his interest in the development of technologies and techniques such as stone-working distinguishes his collections from many others. With the foundation of the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1884 these interests took root in Oxford and were to greatly influence early archaeologists that came to work in Egypt, including David Randall MacIver and John Garstang. This poster presents some of the results of early experiments in the technologies of ancient Egypt in the Pitt Rivers Museum, including Predynastic pottery production and ancient Egyptian flint working.

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