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Pitt Rivers 2065: the Future of Museums MUSEUMS GALLERIES HERITAGE ARCHIVES CULTURE Issue 19 • museum-id.com MuseumiD Cite this paper as: Dan Hicks (2016) Pitt Rivers AD 2065: the Future of Museums, Past and Present. Museums ID 19: 31-37. Further details: https://oxford.academia.edu/DanHicks Twitter: https://twitter.com/ProfDanHicks Creating incredible Multimedia experiences for the Cultural and Heritage Sector For those who expect MORE... Whilst strong storytelling skills continue to be a must, todays visitors require more sophisticated entertainment and an innovative approach to education and interpretation; which is where ATS really comes into its own. Focused on stretching the boundaries in terms of communication, we create high quality tours and visitor experiences which will engage, enhance and deliver multilingual and access friendly content to your visitors. Our solutions include our unique iTouch Multimedia Guide handsets, Mobile apps, and more traditional audio-guides. Our standards are very high. Our teams are led by creative producers with valuable expertise, and we have studios with an experienced production and editing team. We’d like you to think of us as creative collaborators. We’ll not only design absolutely what you need in terms of access and interpretation - we’ll take it to the next level. Please make contact and share your requirements; you may be surprised by what ATS can achieve for you and your visitors. A Future Pitt Rivers Museum - as imagined by Pier Luigi Nervi in 1967 © University of Oxford Pitt Rivers AD 2065: The Future of Museums, Past and Present by Dan Hicks, Associate Professor of Archaeology, University of Oxford hat will the Pitt Rivers a kind of artificially endless present simply puts this capsule into reverse, Museum in Oxford look tense. Each glass-fronted case is a focusing only on the detritus of the Contact ATS today to enhance like in fifty years time? I’m stopped watch. Everyone (even the human past. So let’s get the old W Curator-Archaeologist) quickens their archaeological joke out of the way probably the wrong person to ask. I’m your visitors’ experience an archaeologist, so my academic pace as they pass the fossils and at the outset: The Future’s Not My discipline is usually concerned with the dodo, skip down the steps, and Period. thinking about the past not the walk back out into the fresh air and This is not to say that future. And I’m a museum curator, so the sunlight to resume the normal Archaeologist-Curators never think my institution is normally concerned passage of time. A museum like about the future. In the history with keeping things stable, the Pitt Rivers is more time capsule of the Pitt Rivers one example of T 023 9259 5000 E [email protected] preventing decay, loss or change. than time machine, built to bring such thinking springs immediately objects to a standstill. Archaeology to mind, and it is one that came www.ats-heritage.co.uk Museum vitrines are designed create 30 31 Full Page Adverts.pdf 1 29/06/2016 15:52 Cite this paper as: Dan Hicks (2016) Pitt Rivers AD 2065: the Future of Museums, Past and Present. Museums ID 19: 31-37. Further details: https://oxford.academia.edu/DanHicks Twitter: https://twitter.com/ProfDanHicks Dan Hicks FSA, MCIfA is Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Oxford and Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Dan is a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, a Trustee of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and directs the AHRC-funded Oxford University Museums Collaborative Doctoral Partnership programme. He has published widely on C Archaeology, Anthropology and M Museums, and his books include Y See Objects in an Entirely New Light The Oxford Handbook of Material CM Culture Studies (2010) and World Drawing for proposed new site for Pitt Rivers Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1967 © University of Oxford MY Museum (2013). Twitter: CY @ProfDanHicks CMY K about just over half a century ago. Nervi’s proposed concrete studio and print library; a suite In October 1964, the Pitt Rivers and glass rotunda was 92 metres in of workrooms for post-excavation Museum appointed a new Curator diameter, providing 28,400 square research; and a coffee bar and a (its third since 1891). Bernard Fagg, metres of interior space across restaurant. a distinguished archaeologist and four stories (two of which were An enormous glass dome curator, had been the Director of the underground). It brought together enclosed a special tropical and National Museum in Nigeria, where the full range of Archaeological subtropical ‘Climatron’, inspired by Objects and stories share the same With ColliderCase you can: "Stories surround and interact with he had rebuilt the museum. From and Anthropological activities the iconic domed planthouse built at stage. Requiring no smartphones, no objects in enchanting and the moment of his appointment Fagg of the University at one site: the the Missouri Botanical Garden in St special glasses, and no learning curve. • See inside objects enlightening ways." began work on a plan for a new Pitt collections of the Pitt Rivers and Louis in 1960. The circular galleries Visitor focus is firmly on the object: with • See how they work Rivers Museum. Patrons including the Balfour Library, the Institute of allowed for the anthropological and enjoyment, insight and appreciation. • See their history unfold ColliderCase creates a truly engaging the French anthropologist Claude Archaeology, the Institute of Social archaeological collections to be • See their internal workings learning experience. Objects are Lévi-Strauss and the premiers of Anthropology, the Laboratories for arranged both geographically (by Absolute clarity. • See them come to life, or back to life animated, their stories unfolding in a Ethiopia, Senegal and Malaysia Physical Anthropology, Environmental circumference), and typologically or • See fine detail that is easily missed magical way. were gathered. A decree authorizing Archaeology, and the Research temporally (radially). The proposed The technology is invisible, only the • See hidden aspects and meanings the purchase of a new site in North Laboratory for Archaeology and museum would have looked quite storytelling and object can be seen. • See missing parts Please visit collidercase.com or Oxford from St John’s College was the History of Art. There would be in character among the buildings • See them reunited with other objects virtualcase.com for more information. adopted by Congregation. And in three lecture rooms; a Centre for of Tracy Island – the secret South • See greater meaning in objects 1966, a design for the new museum Musicology with a recording studio; Pacific base of the International was commissioned from Italian a range of museum laboratories Rescue organisation in the children’s architect Pier Luigi Nervi and London and workshops; a Photographic television programme Thunderbirds architects Powell and Moya. Department with darkroom, (first broadcast 1965).[i] @collidercase 32 www.collidercase.com #collidercase33 Cite this paper as: Dan Hicks (2016) Pitt Rivers AD 2065: the Future of Museums, Past and Present. Museums ID 19: 31-37. Further details: https://oxford.academia.edu/DanHicks Twitter: https://twitter.com/ProfDanHicks Fagg’s plans to leave the Victorian building behind were unsuccessful for a number of reasons. There were protests from the residents of Bradmore Road, and Portfolio works with your Collection Management System problems in reaching the fundraising targets. But the project also suffered from a flawed vision of the future. It was, to borrow a term coined by the composer Leonard B. Meyer, a ‘chronocentric’ plan.[ii] Anthropological museums have often been charged with ethnocentrism, but Fagg’s archaeological chronocentrism was driven by his own immediate modern intellectual concerns. In Fagg’s vision of the future, temporal, geographical and typological arrangements were resolved in a single display regime, and the full range of archaeological and anthropological endeavour was brought together at a single location for the study of world culture, past and present. This finality of vision moved away from the spirit of Augustus Pitt-Rivers’ own more open-ended vision of the future of typological museums which, writing in 1891, he imagined ‘would require constant rearrangement’, to the extent that ‘the cases might, perhaps, be put on wheels to A Future Pitt Rivers Museum - as imagined by Pier Luigi Nervi in 1967 facilitate their readjustment’[iii]. © University of Oxford How else might we think about the future of the Pitt Rivers Museum in fifty years time – a full of museum visitors alone tell us grown to more than 3,500 by 2013. century after Fagg’s unsuccessful much. To take some examples from In the universities, interdisciplinary scheme? We might start with thinking the UK, during 2013-14 there were interest in museum collections and about the present day in a different 6.7 million visitors to the British material culture is burgeoning. The way. Today we are living through Museum and 6.4 million to the economic and social impacts of a period of rapid technological National Gallery. Oxford University’s museums are now widely recognised, changes comparable with those four museums – the Ashmolean, Pitt from tourism to the quality of life and of Victorian Britain. The Victorian Rivers, Oxford University Museum of wellbeing that people gain from living Museum Age, and the evolutionary Natural History and Museum of the alongside culture. Perhaps even the thinking that accompanied it, was History of Science – received more longstanding decline in individual • Quickly find digital representations of collection objects to a large extent a response to the than 2.1 million visitors. As visitor giving to museums – the tradition of technological and social changes – numbers have grown, construction philanthropy to which the Pitt Rivers • Track CMS related information such as accession number, changes in transportation, empire, and expansion has transformed owes its beginning – may be starting artist name, title, or other custom fields the measurement of time and space, museums around the world.
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