Sensing Culture at the Pitt Rivers Museum, October 2017

In October Jamie Cameron (Research Assistant, Oxford Internet Institute) came to the Pitt Rivers Museum to 3D scan an object in the museum’s collection; a model of a totem pole (also known as a crest pole) made by the Northwest Coast Haida (1891.49.13 .1 - .2). The scan will be 3D printed and used for Sensing Culture, a Heritage Lottery funded project, led by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB). One of the aims at the project is to develop and produce ways in which the visitor experience for blind and partially sighted people can be improved. Other museums within the University of Oxford GLAM (Gardens, Libraries, Archives and Museums) are also involved.

 Jamie Cameron '3D scanning' the model Crest Pole © Pitt Rivers Museum

Our colleague Laura Peers (Curator of the Americans and Professor of Museum Anthropology) recommended the wooden model of a Haida totem pole for 3D printing. The pole was made in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, Canada, most likely by artist Charles Edenshaw. Our documentation tells us that the model pole was collected by resident missionary Charles Harrison (who published accounts of the Haida) at the end of the 19th Century. The pole itself is carved with ‘crest figures’ that relate to lineages, aspects of status and property rights. To the Haida of the Northwest Coast, the act of looking up at these representations shown on the sides of giant crest poles would have triggered a visual reminder of the stories of how ancestral beings bestowed certain rights on a family. The figures on this particular model pole include an eagle, bears and their cubs in human or ancestral form, frogs and humans.

Unfortunately we don’t yet have insight into why this particular model totem pole was made. Could it have been a prototype for a much larger pole that was never carved? Was it a commercial product for Europeans, or could it have been made to order by European collectors to illustrate the types of narratives on totems that the Haida produced?

 © Pitt Rivers Museum (1891.49.13 .1 - .2) 

In 2009 the museum received a Haida delegation as part of the project “Haida Material Culture in British Museums: Generating New Forms of Knowledge”. The delegates, when looking at the model crest pole, observed that some of the original museum labelling is incorrect, and that the bear at the bottom of the pole was holding in its mouth a prawn or shrimp, and not a crayfish as had been labelled. They also added that this pole might be depicting the bear mother story, a popular Haida narrative. These observations were added to our online database, a living document which reflects the multi-vocality and dynamism of the museum’s collection. Visits like these highlight the importance of retaining relationships between museums and the living communities from which material culture was taken from, often under very difficult and problematic circumstances. The Pitt Rivers Museum always aims to be at the forefront in repairing relationships damaged in the past by European colonial collecting practices. We continue to generate positive outputs such as material repatriation, loans to source communities, access for originating communities to engage with and reconnect with the collection both physically and digitally, and collaborative work, such as the Great Box Project in 2014

Jamie used 3D imaging technologies, including photogrammetry, to create a ‘scan’ of the totem pole. This will be 3D printed, and such prints will allow visitors who are blind or partially sighted to ‘read’ the object through touch. Haida art uses a structured formline design, where different coloured paints highlight certain features, and on carvings such as the model pole, formline appears in incisions in shallow and deep relief. Visitors will be able to feel the incised lines on the 3D print to help understand the layout and proportions of the totem pole. Many museums are using 3D printing to engage their visitors, and it is just one of the ways that the Pitt Rivers Museum works to enable access to its collections.

Nicholas Crowe 

Assistant Curator

The Cooke Daniels Expedition

Heather Donoghue of the University of East Anglia Sainsbury Research Centre recently visited to the Pitt Rivers Museum. Her aim was to further her research on all the objects in UK and Australian museums collected on the Cooke Daniels exhibition more than a century ago.

The Cooke Daniels Expedition visited British New Guinea in 1903 and 1904. Major William Cooke Daniels (d.1918), Professor Charles Gabriel Seligman (1873 - 1940), Dr Walter Mersh Strong (1873-1946) and Mr A. H. Dunning undertook the expedition. 

The Pitt Rivers Museum has 174 objects collected during the exhibition. To search these objects on the Museum's object collections online database enter 'Cooke Daniels' in the 'PRM Source' field in the search criteria. 

1905.63.7, 'Carved board painted, representing 
conventionalized human form in squatting posture' 
collected from Goaribari Island during the expedition. 
On display in case 113.A in the Museum Court. 

Cooke Daniels was a wealthy American department store owner, world traveller and organiser of the expedition. Seligman was a British anthropologist who had trained as a medical doctor specialising in pathology. Mersh Strong, also a doctor, acted as laboratory assistant to Seligman. Dunning was responsible for photography and cinematic recording on the trip. 

Cooke Daniels financed the expedition after a chance meeting with Seligman on a fishing trip in Hampshire. The group also received a grant from the Royal Society towards the expedition expenses. Seligman had some relevant experience having travelled to New Guinea on a previous trip as a member of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (the sea passage north of Australia and south of Papua New Guinea) in 1898 led by Alfred Cort Haddon.

The Cooke Daniels expedition explored British New Guinea, the south east area of modern-day Papua New Guinea. On route the party stopped in Australia. They visited the Bensbach River in the west, close to the border with Dutch New Guinea, travelled to Port Moresby (the capital) and visited Waima and Mekeo in the central district. The trip continued south east and then explored the smaller islands: the Trobriand group, Marshall Bennett Islands and Muyua Island. Cooke Daniels hired and schooner and launch to motor up creeks and sail around the islands. Mersh Strong resigned when the exhibition returned to Port Moresby. 



Seligman sent reports to the Royal Anthropological Society of Great Britain on the trip's progress. An article in the April 1905 issue of 'Science' reported that the exhibition had left for New Guinea in September 1903 and had just recently arrived back in England. 

Objects collected on the expedition now at Pitt Rivers include tools, weapons such as arrows and clubs, canoe prows and betel crushers, musical instruments including bullroarers and drums, lime spatulas, and ornaments made of shell, feathers, and wallaby teeth. Collections are also held at The British Museum, the Horniman Museum, the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Australian Museum. As well as a collecting objects and specimens, the expedition also made photographs, film footage and sound recordings. 

1905.63.62 & 1905.63.42, armlets in the making from the
Trobriand Islands collected during the expedition.
On display in case 117.B in the Museum's Lower Gallery.

Seligman sorted and divided the objects, then donated collections to museums on Cooke Daniels' behalf. Seligman and Merch Strong wrote up the findings of the expedition in two articles entitled 'Anthropogeographical Investigations in British New Guinea' appearing in 1906 in the Geographical Journal. Seligman went on to publish 'The Melanesians of British New Guinea' in 1910. 

Cooke Daniels was a partner in the Daniels and Fisher stores in Denver, Colorado. Some of his ashes were stored in a lead box in the tower of the well known department store building. Cooke Daniels was known as a world traveller in his day. His ashes moved when the store moved location. 

Seligman and his wife Brenda Seligman studied and taught Anthropology, researching communities in Sri Lanka, Sudan, Egypt, China and Japan.

1998.271.58, photograph of a black and white drawing
of Charles Gabriel Seligman by artist William Rothenstein

Madeleine Ding
Assistant Curator