Pitt Rivers

We spent a happy few hours in Oxford today visiting the Pitt Rivers Museum and adjoining Museum of Natural History.  As a result of our travels off the beaten track we have a modest collection of artefacts from Australia, Papua New Guinea and Oceania.  The best public collection in the UK is probably in the Pitt Rivers.  We were surprised to find that objects are not arranged geographically but rather by their function or form.  So there were cases with shell beads, ceramic pots, betel-chewing equipment, dance masks, etc etc from all over the world side by side in the same cases.  Looking for Australian and PNG items was like looking for a needle in a haystack, but we found lots of fascinating things while we were looking.

The top left image is the view from a gallery into the museum which is stuffed full of objects.  The bottom left is the nearest we came to a PNG case with lots of different masks.

The other images are from the Natural History Museum.  On the top row, an obligatory dinosaur and the biggest crab in the world, a Japanese Spider Crab, at least 3m from the tip of one leg to the tip of the opposite leg.  Prince Albert, centre left, presides over the dinosaurs.  My favourite exhibit was the main image, the "Taurus of Time".  An artist (Angela Palmer) collected rocks of different ages from all around the UK and arranged them in date order.  The oldest rock at the bottom is Lewisian Gneiss from the Isle of Barra and is 3bn years old.  The rocks get progressively younger going clockwise.  So the youngest rock is the almost black slice just to the right of centre at the bottom, which is a glacial boulder from Inverness-shire, no more than 2m years old.