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.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Adam Kuper 3 episodes
  Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Boston University
• Richard Bradley 2 episodes
  Professor in Archaeology at the University of Reading
• Dan Hicks No other episodes
  University Lecturer & Curator of Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford

Reading list

• Pitt-Rivers: The Life and Archaeological Work of Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers
  Mark Bowden (Cambridge University Press, 2009) Google Books →
• The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies
  Dan Hicks and Mary Beaudry (eds) (Oxford University Press, 2010) Google Books →
• World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum: A Characterization
  Dan Hicks and Alice Stevenson (eds) (Archaeopress, 2013) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b01qwgxx

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qwgxx

Auto-category: 930 (History of ancient world)