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Pitt-Rivers

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of the Victorian anthropologist and archaeologist Augustus Pitt-Rivers.

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the Victorian anthropologist and archaeologist Augustus Pitt-Rivers. Over many years he amassed thousands of ethnographic and archaeological objects, some of which formed the founding collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University. Inspired by the work of Charles Darwin, Pitt-Rivers believed that human technology evolved in the same way as living organisms, and devoted much of his life to exploring this theory. He was also a pioneering archaeologist whose meticulous records of major excavations provided a model for later scholars.

With:

Adam Kuper
Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Boston University

Richard Bradley
Professor in Archaeology at the University of Reading

Dan Hicks
University Lecturer & Curator of Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford.

Producer: Thomas Morris.

Available now

42 minutes

Last on

Thu 28 Feb 2013 21:30
BBC Radio 4

LINKS AND FURTHER READING

Professor Adam Kuper at Boston University

Professor Richard Bradley at the University of Reading

Dr Dan Hicks at the University of Oxford

Pitt Rivers Museum

Pitt-Rivers - Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Rethinking Pitt-Rivers

Excavating Pitt-Rivers

Rethinking Pitt-Rivers - Biography of General Pitt-Rivers

Lieutenant-General Pitt-Rivers

Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers

Augustus Pitt-Rivers - Wikipedia

READING LIST:

Mark Bowden, Pitt-Rivers: The Life and Archaeological Work of Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Dan Hicks and Mary Beaudry (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (Oxford University Press, 2010), particularly The Material-Cultural Turn: event and effect

Dan Hicks and Alice Stevenson (eds), World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum: A Characterization (Archaeopress, 2013)

Broadcasts

  • Thu 28 Feb 2013 09:00
    BBC Radio 4
  • Thu 28 Feb 2013 21:30
    BBC Radio 4

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