What happens behind the scenes at the Pitt Rivers Museum? In this blog article, Emily Browne shares her experience interning at the Museum for two weeks with the Object Collections team. Emily's blog explores her work conserving textiles, cataloguing South Sudanese objects and preparing a display mannequin for an upcoming exhibition. Her blog offers a practical look at the work involved in caring for, documenting and researching museum collections, and how this contributes to making museums more accessible.
Behind every case in the Pitt Rivers Museum is a story. How an object is meaningful to its source community, how it arrived, how it is cared for now, and how the Museum’s own history—as much as the objects themselves—shapes what we understand it to be. That became clear to me during two weeks spent behind the scenes with the Collections and Conservation team this July. No two days looked the same: I was fortunate enough to get involved with an extraordinary range of projects, gaining real insight into the Pitt Rivers’ behind-the-scenes work. First, I must thank the entire Collections and Conservation team at the Pitt Rivers, especially those I worked closely with, who had the patience to teach me and allow me to collaborate with them.
Textile Conservation
Some of the most physically careful work I did was in conservation, building storage boards out of Correx and calico fabric for a collection of archaeological textiles—mainly Peruvian, alongside a few fragments of Egyptian mummy wrappings. Textiles like these are fragile in ways that are easy to underestimate: age, past handling and even the intricacy of their own creation can cause irreversible damage if they are stored incorrectly. The Correx boards give each textile a rigid, padded surface to lie flat on inside its box, so the textile fragment itself never has to bear the strain of being handled more than is necessary. Here I learned how much conservation is not about intervening with the object at all, but about designing the right housing around it—a quiet, largely invisible kind of care.
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| Figure 1: Fragment of linen from a Pharaoh's tomb, Ancient Egypt, Africa. Accession number 1995.55.2. |
I also got to visit the Collections Teaching and Research Centre (more commonly known as the CTRC), to help pack textiles to go into the new drawers. Most memorable of these pieces were masks from Oman. It was fascinating to hold these masks and imagine how they were worn, as a piece of stiff card projects outward from top to bottom, partly obscuring the wearer’s vision. This led me to look further into how they were worn and why they were made this way. These are traditional face veils worn by Bedouin and other regional women, made from cotton and some dyed deep indigo and polished to a metallic gleam. They shield the wearer from blowing desert sand while also marking tribal affiliation and upholding standards of modesty. The indigo masks were particularly intriguing, creating a beautiful purple iridescence (which also stained the plastic they were originally kept in).
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| Figure 2: An array of textile objects to be packed into trays in the CTRC. |
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| Figure 3: Two elaborately decorated rectangular face masks from Oman. Accession numbers 2003.9.280 (left) and 2003.9.281 (right). |
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| Figure 4: Two indigo-dyed face masks from Oman. Accession numbers 2003.9.278 (left) and 2003.9.279 (right). |
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| Figure 5: Portrait of. Jiddat harasis woman wearing an indigo-dyed face mask, between Haima and Addam in Oman. Accession number: 2018.137.1154. |
Cataloguing South Sudanese Objects
Alongside conservation, I spent several days on the cataloguing side of collections work, digitising a donation of South Sudanese objects given to the Museum by Patti Langton. Personally, I was pleased to be cataloguing material that I had not come across before, since my background is in Mediterranean archaeology. Laid out before me were ten objects: three wooden spoons, a wrist-knife, a horn/tobacco holder, a dried gourd fashioned into a bowl, an anklet, two stools, and a rope used for hanging domestic items.
(Relatively) new acquisitions like these have to be documented from scratch: I made sure the objects were properly described, measured, photographed and entered into the Museum’s database, laying the groundwork for everything that will later make the collection usable—for researchers, for future conservators, and perhaps eventually for the communities the objects came from. It was a useful counterpoint to the conservation work: less about the physical handling of an object already known to the Museum, and more about the first steps of building an object's institutional record. This all contributes to the Pitt Rivers’ ongoing endeavour of caring for the collection and making sure that it is as accessible as possible. I am very grateful to have been guided through the system, and seeing my work now published on the public database is a real pinch-me moment! I am grateful to have been taken through the workings of Adobe Lightroom also, where I learned how to edit object images in the best way for the database, creating good lighting whilst also staying true to an object’s colour and texture.
Having never studied South Sudan before, I found it fascinating to handle and understand how this range of objects had been used. I was also lucky enough to speak to the collector herself, Patti Langton, who visited Sudan in the 1970s as a student. I spoke to her about my internship and how I was cataloguing the items she donated, as well as her vast collection of travel photographs already on the Pitt Rivers database. We also talked about my future career aspirations in museum collections, and in understanding living cultures within UK museums.
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| Figure 6: Ten South Sudanese objects to be catalogued. Accession numbers: 2026.3.1 to 2026.3.10 inclusive. |
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| Figure 7: Tobacco holder/horn from South Sudan with abrus seeds preserved in resin inside. Accession number 2026.3.3. |
This is a good point to mention the pest management that goes on in conservation, which is of course paramount to collections care. Abrus seeds are small, glossy red beans marked with a single black spot. Communities around the world have long used them in traditional crafts, decorative masks, and percussion instruments. However, they must be handled with great care: the seeds' interior contains abrin, an extremely toxic protein, making careless handling genuinely dangerous. They were inside the tobacco holder, encased in resin, and so the hazard was minimal. Moths and outdated conservation practices proved the most persistent issues for conservators to deal with—the glue and tape once used on delicate materials like silk flags degrades over time, and dealing with this was a constant task in the studio. There was also a time when a large moth was spotted in the bathroom next to the conservation studio, and the collections team notified the conservation team to see if there was any risk posed—no stone unturned when caring for the collection, and pest management is always on everyone’s mind!
Preparing the Gaidinliu Mannequin
The project I found most affecting was demounting and remounting a display mannequin associated with the Museum’s Gaidinliu collection. Gaidinliu (1915–1993), a Naga woman, was sixteen when she led a rebellion against British colonial rule between 1929 and 1932 in what is now Assam, Nagaland and Manipur. After her capture, the British confiscated her notebooks, ritual objects and clothes, some of which eventually entered the Pitt Rivers’ collections. A new exhibition will open to the public in November 2026, and I gained insight into how textile conservators work to produce a mannequin, draped with two pieces of clothing, which Gaidinliu herself once wore.
The mannequin itself was already draped when I first saw it. To me, it looked perfectly fine—and I wondered what work needed to be done! Then, I learned that this version was a mock-up to show members of the Naga community, and those with greater expertise in historic clothing from this specific person, place and period. There, conservators listened as community members explained that the textile across the mannequin’s chest had been draped as if for a left-handed wearer, when Gaidinliu was in fact right-handed. These are the kinds of details a visitor might not notice in an exhibition, but they show how dedicated and detail-oriented the Pitt Rivers conservators are. At the forefront of their work is care for the textile and an understanding of the material’s significance, achieved by working closely with source communities.
We then demounted the mannequin—and remounting it was not so simple. The mannequin had to be prepped so that the textile sat correctly and looked like a body underneath, specifically to Gaidinliu’s build, rather than a static, flat surface. Working on the mannequin meant sewing padding and calico, using a herringbone stitch. Although I’m no stranger to cross-stitch, my fingers definitely need more practice getting used to working with a bent needle, and to sewing something that isn’t flat. So I relearned to sew—first by hand, then, for the first time, on a sewing machine—adjusting the mount until the garments sat correctly and safely. The process wasn't straightforward: some of the machine sewing I did had to be scrapped, since I later redid the Velcro strips I had made to cover more of the waist. It made me think about the project as a whole rather than fixating on the time spent on any one part—approaches shift along the way, and the process is a creative one. It was slow, careful work, and a reminder that mounting is never a neutral act: the way a body is represented shapes how a visitor understands the person and the history behind the object. I will certainly be back to see the Gaidinliu exhibition, and take great pride in the mannequin that I played a small part in putting together.
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| Figure 8: Sewing padding onto the mannequin, Gaidinliu's textiles on the table ready to be draped. Photo credit: Ellie Welch. |
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| Figure 9: Learning how to use a sewing machine, to create velcro strips to support the textile on the mannequin. |
Accessibility: Decanting the Court and a Visit From the School of the Sword
Accessibility has always been central to my passion for museums—whether that is digitisation, gallery curation, research visits, or family activities. The Pitt Rivers practices accessibility in each of these ways—throughout my internship, there was an ongoing court decant project where cases in the gallery were emptied, with a view to removing the cases entirely to make the floor physically accessible. We finished decanting the fire-making case and part of the musical instruments collection. The cases themselves are in fact museum objects, so that creates an extra challenge for the collections team!
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| Figure 9: The fire-making case in the court, during its decanting. |
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| Figure 10: Fire-making objects decanted from the case in the gallery. |
At the end of my first week, I was pleased to see on the schedule a visit from the School of the Sword, a HEMA group interested in rapiers. Ten swords were decanted from their case in the gallery, expertly done on a ladder, as some of the swords were stored in crates above the cases. The ease with which the collections team removes objects from the cases is wonderful and creates a unique form of access for researchers and study groups. The HEMA group arrived, and in four groups, were guided to the study room and told, in no uncertain terms, not to poke one another with the swords (which elicited a giggle from the visitors). Almost immediately we were told that one of the swords was not actually a rapier, and each subsequent group made the same connection. I loved seeing the passion in the room, and talking to some of the visitors, I also learned a lot about the swords too, how they were used in different forms and ways. The great thing about the Pitt Rivers is that you are always coming across material from all over the world, all kinds of objects, and learning something new, whether that is intentional or not.
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| Figure 11: A variety of swords retrieved from the gallery, ready to be redisplayed after the School of the Sword visit. |
Reflections
Between off-site trips to the offsite storage facility (which is currently being built) in Swindon, packing bagpipes bound for long-term storage, sitting in on a meeting with the British Museum’s Africa, Oceania and the Americas department, and observing best practice for handling human remains ahead of a source community visit, I can only describe my short time with the Collections and Conservation team at the Pitt Rivers as a treasure trove of insight and hands-on experience. No two days were the same, and each task—however small—was a reminder of how much unseen work sustains the Museum. I extend an enormous thank you to everyone at the Pitt Rivers for making my time there so memorable.
Emily Browne
MSt Classical Archaeology
University of Oxford
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