Stones and Skirts: Interning at the Pitt Rivers Museum

I remember the first time I went to a museum in primary school, on a fieldtrip. I had been interested in history even then, and seeing history manifest itself in material objects, all in one place, blew my little mind. As I grew older, my interest in history and the cultures and peoples of the past continued to develop, and ultimately, after gaining a Bachelor’s in Anthropology and Sociology, I decided to pursue a Master’s in Archaeology at Oxford University. It was stressful and very difficult at times, but whenever I needed a break to rekindle my love for my studies, I would go and roam around the various museums of Oxford, and the Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM) quickly became one of my favourites, as it combined my love of both anthropology and archaeological material culture. When I heard that the PRM was offering a summer internship, I knew that I had to apply.

Interior view of the Pitt Rivers Museum © Pitt Rivers Museum

I applied to the paid five-week internship at the Pitt Rivers, funded by the Santander Award, through the Oxford University Internship Programme (OUIP), which allows students of the University of Oxford to apply to a large variety of internships both in the UK and abroad. I, along with another intern who is to begin after I finish, were selected for the Collections Internship at the Pitt Rivers. I was both excited and intimidated, and the feeling has not diminished even after the 5 weeks that I have spent here.

I performed a wide variety of tasks at the PRM, as the internship was meant to give me an idea of the various types of jobs and roles which are available in museum work; from shadowing Faye Belsey and Nicholas Crowe (my two supervisors) as they went about their various daily tasks (working on displays, meeting researchers, moving objects from various stores to the museum, etc.), learning how to catalogue objects into the museum’s database and doing research for future exhibitions, to spending afternoons with various museum staff to learn about their projects and going with them to collect new acquisitions, this internship gave me a taster of the various types of jobs that are available in the museum sector. 

In my first few weeks, I spent a lot of time shadowing different people, and looking at the projects which they were working on. I spent an afternoon looking at the journals and writings of Makereti Papakura, a Maori noblewoman, guide and ethnographer; she was the first Maori ethnographer, and one of the first to focus on women in the Maori culture. Her writings gave me a fascinating insight into both her life, and the culture and traditions of a people I knew very little about. I spent another afternoon looking through photographs donated by a British photographer of his travels, primarily through Asia and Africa, places which look significantly different than they did 70 years ago, with the pictures serving as archives of rapidly changing landscapes. 

One day a week, I helped the team at the Museum store; a large amount of the Pitt Rivers collection is stored there and is in the process of being catalogued, packed and relocated. Most of my days there I spent packing objects (mostly spears and amulets), in awe of the creative and vastly different designs human beings employ for the same objects. 

I also spent a large amount of time cataloguing and recording stone tools from Rohri, Pakistan. Some of the tools had not been previously recorded, and the experience of learning how the cataloguing system worked, how to record information about the stone tools and going through accession books trying to match the tools to their correct accession numbers, was extremely informative. Furthermore, the stone tools came from an area about 70 miles from Mohenjo-Daro, one of the largest settlements of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization, and an area of the world which holds a special place in my heart, as I am from Pakistan, and my research interests lie there as well. To be able to handle, record and engage with these tools in such a manner, and to be able to learn more about lithic analysis while doing so (something which I knew very little about), remains one of the highlights of my internship.

Original catalogues with drawings of stone tools © Pitt Rivers Museum

Alongside cataloguing the stone tools, one of the most interesting tasks which I performed was looking up information on two Iraqw skirts which the museum is to put on display soon. The skirts are examples of some of the most elaborately decorated textiles in East Africa, and were made by girls during the Marmo initiation ritual, where girls were taken away by elder women and secluded for up to a year. During this time, the girls were fed foods which were rich in fat and resulted in obesity, the area around their mouths was blackened with charcoal, animal oil was applied to their skin to make them shine, their bodies were scented with perfume obtained from a tree, they were taught folk songs and word games as well as sexual manners and were allowed to embroider their leather capes with beads of their own designs, making them into the skirts to be displayed. The girls would also be circumcised during this time. The ritual was thought to purify the girls, so that when they emerged from their seclusion, wearing their skirts and being highly adorned, they were thought to be reborn with a new innocence and dignity. Even though the ritual was banned in 1930, it is speculated that it was still carried out in secret. The skirts were absolutely stunning, and looking up information about them, and as a result, information about the Iraqw people and the marmo ritual, gave me insight into a part of the world and a people which I knew very little about. 

Iraqw skirts 1940.7.0114 and 2017.139.1© Pitt Rivers Museum

Aside from gaining valuable work experience and being able to look at various objects through the lens of a (albeit temporary) museum employee rather than just a visitor, one of the best things about my internship was also the people whom I worked with. Both Faye and Nicholas were incredibly kind, friendly, involved, and genuinely interested in what I wanted my internship experience to be like, and then tailoring it to my needs and interests. Everybody else in the museum was also genuinely passionate about their work, and were always more than happy to talk to me about it. 

I believe that this internship has not only given me a fantastic job experience, but has also rekindled my passion for working in the museum industry, and for all of these things, I am grateful. 

Hadiqa Khan 

Conservation of a 19th Century Tahitian 'Poncho'

As part of the final year of my MSc in Conservation for Museums and Archaeology at UCL, I am undertaking a five-month internship in the Conservation Department of the Pitt Rivers Museum. I have been lucky enough to spend some of my time here researching and conserving a fascinating object. Although it was "found unentered" (that is, found without an accession number or other identifying information) in the Museum store in 1984, more has since been discovered about the object's provenance. More recently, it came to the attention of Conservation staff, who blogged about it here - which is how it ended up as my internship project.

Based on analogies with objects at the Royal Economic Botany Collection at Kew Gardens (42977, 73328 and 73329) and at the British Museum (Oc1960,11.22, Oc1960,11.24 and Oc1960,11.25), the object can be identified as a traditional Tahitian poncho-like garment called a tiputa. It consists of a rectangular piece of barkcloth with a central opening to pass over the wearer's head. It is elaborately decorated with rosettes made of folded monocot leaf strips or stems and long fringes of extremely delicate plant leaf epidermis.

PRM 1984.3.1, front shown after conservation treatment © Pitt Rivers Museum

Given the lack of information about how the poncho came to be in the Pitt Rivers Museum collections, it is not implausible to suggest that - like the comparable objects from Kew and the British Museum - it may have been collected by Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, during a visit to Tahiti in 1869.

The Duke of Edinburgh is shown in this carte-de-visite photograph surrounded by Tahitian royal women in 1869 (image taken from the web page 'Ahoy - Mac's Web Log', where a now defunct commercial website 'oceania-ethnographica.com' is credited as the original source of the image). 

Prince Alfred's visit took place almost exactly a century after Captain Cook's first voyage, by which time there had already been extensive contact between Tahitians and Europeans. In fact, contemporary travellers' and missionaries' accounts describe islanders wearing a combination of barkcloth and Western woven textile clothing. It is interesting to note that by the mid-19th century, barkcloth production had probably ceased on Tahiti, so the material may have been imported from another Polynesian island. The highly decorated style of the poncho, moreover, does not fit in the traditional category of Tahitian high-status barkcloth, which was white and undecorated. All of this points to the poncho being the product of a period marked by dynamic, creative use of material culture to define colonial identities.

PRM 1984.3.1 as found in storage, before conservation treatment © Pitt Rivers Museum

From a conservation point of view, the poncho presented several problems, many of which resulted from inappropriate storage conditions in the past. The garment had been folded in half twice, and was then tightly packed into a wooden crate. This led to distortion and creases in the barkcloth material itself, as well as extensive damage and material loss to the fragile decorations. The decorative fringes which remained on the object were tangled, creased and damaged. The object was also rather dirty.

Bag of detached fragments. PRM 1984.3.1 © Pitt Rivers Museum

Thick covering of dirt on one of the rosettes. PRM 1984.3.1 © Pitt Rivers Museum

Tangled, creased and damaged edge fringes. PRM 1984.3.1 © Pitt Rivers Museum

Besides providing an opportunity to revisit some research into the poncho's cultural and historical significance, the main aim of the conservation treatment was to improve the structural stability of the poncho, while also improving its visual appearance. I used a Preservation Pencil to humidify the fringes one by one, straightened and untangled them, and repaired damaged areas with small patches of Japanese tissue paper adhered with starch paste. I cleaned the rosettes with a fine brush and vacuum tweezers and then misted them with a consolidant coating to strengthen the material. Finally, integral to the conservation treatment was devising a more appropriate storage solution, which would allow the object to be stored more comfortably and accessed more safely and conveniently in the future.

Humidifying and straightening the edge fringes, in progress. PRM 1984.3.1 © Pitt Rivers Museum

The scale of a conservation project like this cannot be underestimated. I spent 110 hours in total on the treatment and used around £78 worth of archival-grade materials (corrugated polypropylene board, Plastazote foam, cotton calico and polyester wadding) for the repacking. The volume of the new storage box is approximately 540 litres - nearly eight times the volume of the old crate. This clearly has implications for space availability inside the Museum store, an increasingly precious resource.

PRM 1984.3.1 in its new storage box, with the old crate pictured alongside © Pitt Rivers Museum

Finally, the treatment has provided me with an opportunity to collect already detached samples of the various plant materials present, with a view to carrying out more detailed identification using scanning electron microscopy and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy at UCL's Institute of Archaeology. This analysis will be done over the next few months and I hope to be able to share the results in a follow-up blog post then.

Naomi Bergmans
Conservation Student