In Our Time - Pitt-Rivers

Episode Date: February 28, 2013

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 UniversityRichard Bradley Professor in Archaeology at the University of ReadingDan Hicks University Lecturer & Curator of Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford.Producer: Thomas Morris.

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get your podcasts. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, one of the world's most extraordinary museums can be found in a grand Victorian building in central Oxford. The interior is a delightful clutter of glass cases

filled with a bewildering variety of objects from totem poles to musical instruments, human skulls to Egyptian sarcophagi and weapons. This is the Pitt Rivers Museum, founded in 1884 by General Augustus Pitt Rivers, who donated more than 18,000 objects from his private collection. Pitt Rivers was a pioneering archaeologist and anthropologist, who dedicated much of his life to the study of human technology and its development. He excavated many ancient sites and is credited with the development of modern archaeological techniques,

and he was among the first to argue for the preservation of our ancient monuments. With me to discuss Augustus Pitt Rivers and his work, Adam Cooper, visiting professor of anthropology at Boston University Richard Bradley, Professor in Archaeology at the University of Reading, and Dan Hicks, University Lecturer and Curator of Archaeology at the Bit Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Adam Cooper, Augustus Bitrivers, wasn't his original name,

he was born in 1827 as Augustus Lane Fox. Can you tell us a little about his early life? Well, his father was a younger son, had some sort of estate, small estate in Yorkshire, and he died when Augustus was five. And his mother took him to London, and he sort of disappears from the records. We know very little about him in London.

We're not even sure what sort of education he had, if any. At the age of 14, he enrols at Sandhurst. In those days, Sandhurst was a sort of public school rather than postgraduate military place. And he was only there for six months and left. And the next thing we know at the age of 18, his commissioners to the Grenadier Guards. So we know very little about his childhood education,

but there seems to be in little formal education at all. He went into the army and served in Crimea. Very briefly, yes. Very briefly. His army career is largely as a musketry person. He's put on the commission to decide what kind of guns the British Army should use in Crimea. So in his early 20s he married, as it was then thought, to be above his station, and to wait three years for his much more distinguished wife, surname with Stanley, for her family to accept him.

But 25 years later, in 50, when he was about 50, an enormous thing happened at him. Can you tell us? He won the lottery. His father was a youngest son. He was a youngest son. He was a youngest son. He didn't have any expectations at all. But his mother's brother was heir to the river's estate.

And the rivers, this was the largest land-owning family outside the aristocracy, hugely wealthy. And by a series of accidents, none of which he sort of expected the age of 50 something, he suddenly inherits this huge estate and one of the conditions is that he has to change his name, he has to adopt the name, Pitt Rivers, so he becomes Augustus, Lane Fox, Petrivers and a huge Magnuson landowner. And he had the equivalent in today's money

of over £2 million a year to spend, which he spent on a collection that he'd already begun when he was quite a young man. Yes, yes. He now goes into overdrive in collecting and starts establishing museums really to house these collections so he becomes it's every collector's dream

you know suddenly you've got all the money you need and not only that but on his estate there are all these wonderful archaeological sites so it's like a dream world yes it's on his own estate he had stone age findings

Saxon finding medieval findings so he didn't have to go far from home to dig no no no and he Well, there used to be the stories that he was very, very reluctant, foxhunter, but occasionally he used to have foxhunts on the estate. And he had stopped halfway and say, a flint, a flint, everybody's. Yes. So they collect flinters.

Anyway, never mind. Dan Hicks, let's get some idea of this collecting. We've said he'd begun quite early when he was in the army, and then he was very steady. He had a big collection before he inherited, he had a big collection before he inherited this great wealth. Can you tell us what he was collecting? Of course, yeah.

So he tells us that he initially collects from 1851. It's an interesting date in that it is the date of the great exhibition in London. We don't know if he attended it, although he was in London, and he's a Londoner for most of his life. And certainly the idea of the works of industry of all nations is an idea that is important for understanding the objects that he acquires. over the course of his life after that date. So he's assembling objects from auction dealers,

from other antiquarians. He doesn't have travelled in order to acquire these objects. He's really obtaining them in London and is also excavating at the same time and is assembling archaeological objects in the same way. And if you like, the key to understanding what he is acquiring is about that mix of archaeology

and ethnography, ethnology, as he calls it. That idea of an archaeology of objects which includes objects from the world around him, ethnographic objects, but also objects from London and England as well. England is a large area from which he acquires objects. And by and large, we could tell him about ethnology are saying,

but it's also technology. He's very interested in how the technical development of man matches and goes along with the evolution of mankind. Absolutely. So the key idea that he has is there's everyday objects, a typical object, as he calls them, are important in how people live. And that's what he acquires.

He says he acquires objects which are ordinary, a typical, not rare, not designed to impress, not attractive often, but are everyday objects which are important in everyday life around the world, sort of technological objects, but very much everyday technologies. He begins with guns and weapons

and moves on into a whole range of other forms of objects, or as he puts it, sort of types of object. And he's talking about pots and pots and pans, isn't he? He is. He's talking about lighting, for example. So the Eurda Pit Rivers in Oxford you can visit and you can see a case of lights and lighting, the lamps from the ancient world, from the Roman period and from the 19th century.

He was assembling according to type, according to form and type, and also, as you indicate, arranging objects into series, as he called them, which were at the heart of his idea of type, is that idea that form alters over time. But if you have a stick, it can turn into a boomerang, turn into a spear, you can turn into a harpoon, and on we go. Absolutely. And these are very much sort of hypothetical series, which he explores.

He says, I mean, this isn't strict evolution in many ways. This is an idea that if you were to take objects from the world around us and attempt to put them into order, maybe objects in our everyday world include sort of survivals from things from the past. if you combine that with archaeology, you end up with a way of exploring the past, which is based on objects, not on sort of texts alone. And this is very important at this point in the 19th century, because it's a time where there's a realisation of the depth of antiquity.

At that time, there's an awareness of the sheer amount of sorts of time, that there is in sort of human antiquity, in prehistory. And we're talking about, we're going to, I'm asking now how he displays these collections because that is essential to the way he sees archaeological history. And even though he did inherit this massive wealth, as Adam Fupa said, when he was about 50, well before then he'd got a big collection, he'd put it in a Bethnal Green Museum. His house could, as what it was like living in his house, but his house was full of the stuff.

And at the end he had about 50,000 objects, and he gave, about half to Pitt rivers, but that's just giving some idea of the obsession of the man and the numbers. How did it lay out the museum in Oxford, and why is that important for him? Okay, so he acquires objects, as I say, from the 1850s, and really until, for the first years of that process, this is an assemblage in his own house,

or a series of houses in central London at Kensington. In 1873, he moves to Guildford, and he wants to retain his objects in central London. So he loans the objects then to the South Kensington Museum. They are arranged in what he calls a typological manner in East London, according to types. All the spears together, for instance. All the spears together. So he does that in the Bethel Green Annex of the South Kensington Museum.

They're then shown in South Kensington, which is now the VNA. And then in 1881, he's really looking for a permanent home for that typological museum. And he makes the gift to the University of Oxford. And the first half of his, all of the assemblages that he acquires are the basis of what is now the Pitt River's Museum at the University of Oxford. He then, though, all that time that those objects are being held by the museums in London, he's adding to them. He's continuing to collect. It must have been a nightmare for the curators who were, he would sort of send more objects which he'd excavated or acquired and they'd be added in.

So after 1884, after the museum is established in Oxford, he continues, of course, to collect. and he makes a second collection on his estate on the Wiltshire Dorset border. As Richard Bradley, Dan Hicks has hinted at, and as I get from all of your notes, we're in a time of immense intellectual ferment in this country at the last, say, quarter of the 19th century. We have Matthew Arnold's work, we have Darwin, we have Tyler, anthropology, we have Huxley, we have people.

How did we get here? What is the progression? It's a huge, it looks now. very easily concentrated, easily to pigeonhills are concentrated. It must have been quite wonderful, and piecemeal how he came together. And these people were encountering each other. They were just on the same beat in a particular part of West London at one stage. And his big encounter was with Charles Darwin, the ideas of Charles Darwin.

Can you tell us about that? Well, Pitt Rivers from the 1850s had this massive collection. He'd also, in the course of teaching musketry, arrived at the principle that, change in material objects is very gradual, that different types can be put in hypothetical order, but there's no sudden changes. Then he discovers Darwin, published 1859, and here is an explanation in his eyes of what he's been seeing. Now, it's in a sense of false explanation because Darwin was not writing about material objects at all. he's writing about natural selection.

But Pitt Rivers suddenly became a disciple and a very ardent disciple he was. He concluded that his objects, his collections could be reordered according to Darwinian principles. And more than that, he began to see himself not as a collector, but as a scientist,

and a scientist with a message to teach a wider public. Now, one reason why he was so involved, was through his marriage that the Stanlies of Alderly were a family with a lot of links in intellectual life and a lot of the leading fingers of his day he met, not through his collection, but through his marriage. People like John Stuart Mill, the houseguess, the Joseph Preswick, the director of the Society of Antichrist, was actually a relative by marriage. And two of the people he met at that time were particularly important to him. One was Thomas Huxley, And the other was Sir John Lubbock, who much later became his son-in-law.

Now, they're important because they were very close to Darwin. Lubbock was literally close. He was his next-gone neighbour, yes. Literally close. They looked after Darwin. They, in a sense, acted as his spokesman. And Pitrevers, as far as we know, never met Darwin, although he must have been one of his most ardent disciples. He took from Darwin, and there's a sense in which he took from Darwin, wasn't on Darwin's plate, but he took from him. and this deep idea that there had been a cultural evolution where utility was the key, just as fitness as it might be, it was the key in human evolution.

And if you followed that utility, wanting yourself above all was that it was conservative and gradual and slow and did not countenance revolutions. That mattered to him in a profound way as a man. And there was a political dimension, wasn't there? Absolutely. And I think even more so, as he went from being an army officer to being a country, landowner. He clearly moved to the right and one of the other people he met through his wife,

Herbert Spencer, did the same. He started as a radical. He believed initially in votes for all. He believed in the nationalisation of private land. By the time that Pitt Rivers was a landowner and of course in contact regularly with Spencer, he absolutely rejected this and was vehemently opposed to what they both regarded as socialism. But to come back to, it's a useful analogy of that, but it doesn't take us far enough really in terms of the ideas that were around

at the time, because it's a very strong idea that he's, he's looking at these objects, as far ahead of the field as you can be, although it's happening in other countries, but he was a massive collectors, and he has come to an idea about the development of humankind. Now, did this find

favour in scholarly circles? He was, as Adam Cooper said at the beginning, we have very little knowledge at all of what sort of education he had, but then he's in the royal society, he's moving around with these, people you've mentioned his wife's family, the Stanley's, but did his ideas take him there, and did the fact that he had this enormous collection

and was rather an eccentric person? I think his ideas were relatively superficial. He was really a great fan of theory. He was someone who wanted desperately to be a scientist, and maybe his family background as a younger son of a younger son with

little formal education, influenced him, but I think it was essentially personal contacts, and it's certainly been argued that much of the reason that he had such an important circle around him of really major scholars was it he was a brilliant organiser. He was president of their societies, he did the secretarial work, he organised their conferences. I think he was the practical man among the intellectuals, and they depended on him to quite a considerable extent. He was a brilliant organiser, as we'll come to say, as an archaeologist. Adam Guber, to come back to you,

can we take this idea of cultural evolution and what part Pitt Rivers plays in it and why it's so important, which is so many of them at the time, what's going on there for about 20 years? It's absolutely a fascinating theory. It is. It's a very, very open question for these late Victorians,

because even the Darwinians, they know, they can make an argument about biological evolution, about the emergence of humans. But then you've got the problem of humans remaining biologically pretty much the same, but moving from Stone Age, Hunter Galleries and so on, to empire builders and so. So how does that happen?

And Darwin in the descent of man says, well, it happens through the interaction of growing intelligence and technological sophistication, and they interact with each other. So that as your technology improves, it takes the small, smarter people to master the technology, therefore they're more successful in breeding, therefore intelligence and technology developed together. So that's Darwin's argument.

And what But Rivers does is to sort of separate out technology and give technology a life of its own and assume that technology develops more or less independently, but according to some broad evolutionary principle, which is that it's gradual series of improvements and improvements can be measured because they're more and more useful. But that there is no jump and there are no huge new inventions. It's just a series of gradual improvements so the stick evolves into the spear

and the spear evolves into the musket and so on and so forth down the line. So that's his idea. And so as Richard said, it's a rather simple, idea. It's not exactly a dogwining idea, but it fits more or less in the mood of the kinds of arguments that people were making at the time to answer this huge question. How did we get from there to hear? Was there a thought then, Adam, that everybody who had ever lived was at a certain stage on this route from way back to now, and the intelligence was about the same, but they just happened to have different technologies around them. So when you looked at people,

in the Amazon and when you looked at people in Siberia when you looked at people in Middle England they were just at a different stage of what would be the same route? They were all climbing the same ladder at a different pace but whether or not this was also something

which could be measured in terms of brain power was an open question and Darwin himself is quite ambivalent about this but a general idea was that the savages had less brain power and civilised people.

And so there was a biological... How did they justify that? Well, they measured skulls and they came to a conclusion the size of skulls. But Darwin himself, he was very... He's very contradictory about this.

Sometimes he says, yes, these people just have less brainpower, they're less smart. But then when he's in Tiradil Fuego and he's troubling with what he calls savages, he says, well, they're just as intelligence as anybody I meet in London and so on. But most of these people assumed that, yes, there was a single series of developments

which we could measure by technological progress and also by the development of brain power. And so savages were at the same stage as our own distant ancestors. And they were producing the same kind of material objects. So Dan Hicks, back to the museum. Did he set out his museum to reflect these theories? in these theories. He did in certain ways, and certainly if you visit the

museum now, you're not going to see a reflection of those ideas that we hear of in terms of evolution, but you certainly will in terms of the key idea he introduces, which is a typology. So he arranges his, the objects,

not regionally, not according to time, but according to a type, mixing up objects from alternative sources according to form and according to how they might alter over time. So that is, I think, the key really. He says that for him history is another word for evolution. Evolution is another word for history. He's interested in the time depth that you can see inside those objects. And so he organises objects according to this thing, he calls sort of type, typology, which is a word he coins.

Richard Bradley, he was very much a hands-on archaeologist, about somebody who made slight jokes about him doing it all in his own estate, but he did go around, he did, he made significant discoveries in Egypt, he made a lot in this country, he was in Ireland and so on. And he can you, would, and he said to have brought a lot of order, method, and sense to this activity. Can you give some idea. Yes. Actually, going on very much from what Dan was saying. One of his great concerns in doing archaeology

was to extend his series of types, and probably before he inherited his most important project was in Sussex on a series of hill forts. One of them, a place called Sisbury near Worthing, also has mines for making flint axes. And the great question was what was, the relationship between them. And he specifically says

the reason for excavating is not to understand hill forts, is not to understand flint mining. It is to extend my collection of different types back into the remote past. And he developed the excavation that way. But then... Different types of flintes are talking about flint. Different types of pottery in hillfort.

But then, as happened to him over and over again, his practical bent took over. he got interested in experiment. He started making his own flint mine with an antler pick. He started making his own flint axes. And the techniques almost took on a life of their own over and above his original objective of simply collecting more material

to illustrate his basic thesis about evolution. Adam Cooper, can you give us the context of the status of archaeology in this country at that time where Britain was compared with, say, Scandinavia and Germany? Well, it's the middle of the 19th century, you have this transition from archaeology as digging up great classical antiquities and wonderful buildings and treasures and so on

to what begins to be called prehistory, trying to find out what life was like before ancient Roman Greece and so on. And of course, that involves very different kinds of techniques and objectors and so forth. It really ties in with the development of geology because as geology begins to reveal the great age of the earth, it also begins to show that you can date objects which are buried

according to different geological strata. That was a great event, wasn't it, in most people. and the great event in Darwin's life, the shattering event in Ruskin's life, the clinking of those hammers and so on geology. We've got regarded us so radical now. Geology is the forgotten science, but it's absolutely key in 19th century England,

and it's key in the development of archaeology. And what you then have on the continent, particularly in Scandinavia, is the development of the idea that all these objects, these prehistoric objects we're digging up, actually can be ordered in different time periods. And so all the stone objects are the very earliest ones. Then you have bronze objects, which are later in time.

We can work that out by geological methods. And then we have the development of iron much later. So you have the ordering of, first of all, European prehistory and then world prehistory in terms of geology and the kind of materials. Stone Age. Bronze Age, Iron Age. And so this is really the huge breakthrough. The second breakthrough at the same time is you begin to get more methodical

about recording the process of the excavation and where the different objects are actually found and what levels of the excavation. And trying to preserve the excavation for later people to work So you have the model now, which is the time series, and you begin to have the technology, the techniques to be able to do this all more systematic. This is the development of archaeology, really, in the second half the 19th century, into which Pitt Rivers fits.

He fits very well in this area, Richard Bradley. Can you give us a close-up, really, one of his excavations? Take one of his own estate at South Lodge Camp. Can you just describe that and give us some idea of what he did that was so essential at the time to clarify and to bring into order this taking a flying shovel at a pile of Roman remains? It was Bronze Age and that was one of the first revelations

that came from the work. He decided very early on that he was not going to follow the Victorian tradition primarily of digging burial mounds but to go for settlements, which obviously links to the types of material, everyday material, what he was collecting. South Lodge Camp is a small square enclosure with a bank and ditch round it in the edge of his own park. What he wanted to know was, first of all, the sequence of objects in the ditch, which was excavated first, and excavated in arbitrary levels on a geological model, not natural layers as one would excavate it, now. Can you explain the difference?

Well, that essentially ditches fill up with material falling in, but it doesn't fall in, in horizontal levels. It falls in like scree. Pitt Rivers dug in one foot depths.

So it was a very crude measure of time, and in fact, he was unfortunate at South Lodge camp because it's clear the ditch was deliberately backfilled. But he then excavated the interior. to try and work out what happened there. He found large amounts of bronze age material

and very few structural traces at all. He found one post socket, what he called an empty grave, and not much else, but what was fascinating was that he recorded the exact position of every single item in his trench. And that manuscript plan was never published.

It never got into the record. When we went back, I went back with Professor John Barrett, late 70s, early 80s. We went there because of the quality of the record, the quality of the collection which still survived, all the finds were labelled, quality of the published account,

to find out what the monument had been, and we discovered that it had actually been a settlement. There were houses inside it. But the post sockets for the timber walls really wouldn't have been recognised in the 19th century because he excavated it by a narrow trench, which simply moved across the site. They're filling in one stage, moving across,

and without seeing the whole area exposed at once, well, frankly, we wouldn't have seen that. And was this novel, was his approach to excavation novel? It was really, I mean, he's a key individual in the movement out of antiquarianism, intermodern scientific archaeology. Did that become known as a pit river's method in his own day? There was a pit, I think, I mean, the key thing is, there were lots and lots of methods with which he experimented.

So not only in terms of open area excavation, but in terms of a field walking, walking across a field and looking at what there is lying around and realising that that's evidence if you map it of what's underneath the ground. Rescue archaeology as the railways are going into central London. He's working with the workmen, well, paying the workman to obtain Roman materials.

He understands, if you like, the salvage context of archaeology. And at the same time, you know, the modern idea of the report on an archaeological excavation is really born with him. So he's really sort of, you know, pioneering with these approaches, but also a number that don't last over time, the models which he makes out of wood of his excavations, which are highly detailed, entirely accurate, but are not an approach that we would use today.

So his careful methods, his keeping of records, which are quite useful, well, very useful for people even today, and so even about things he didn't quite know what was happening at the time, that's about Adam Cooper. We've talked, we mentioned John Lubbock, who was literally a neighbour of Charles Darwin, who married one of Pitt River's daughters. Can you explain his significance in this archaeological, anthropological movement?

Well, first of all, he was very close to Darwin, and that's key. And he was, as Richard Citi, sometimes operated as a sort of spokesman for Darwin, particularly in Parliament. He represented the Darwinians and the Darwinian projects. Another odd figure, he came from banking family. He's pulled out of Eton at the age of 14 and put in the bank. So again, he has like Perravers no formal education. at all, but very involved with Darwin and he

develops scientific interests and his great crusade really is to link the archaeological materials which are coming up and the idea of the series of prehistoric stages

with the records which are appearing of modern as he calls some savages or primitive peoples. So the model is that modern primitive peoples correspond to some ancient archaeological populations. And he puts these two together. So one of his most famous books, the title

is prehistoric times as illustrated by ancient remains and the manners and customs of modern savages. That's really his country. It's not novel. It's not terrifically profound or sophisticated, but it's very popular. And so he's one of the people who gave gets these new ideas out there in the general population. He marries Pitt Rivers' daughter. He's only seven years younger than Pitt Rivers.

He's twice the age of his wife. It's his second wife. And he and his father-in-law don't get on. And I think they don't get on partly because there's a certain amount of rivalry in the relationship. However, one of Lubbock's great crusades is to set up some register and protection for ancient monuments. And when he actually gets this done,

he makes his father-in-law the first director of this wonderful project. So there was some reconciliation between them. Dan Hickshire becomes the inspector of ancient monuments. That's a very high standard, doesn't it, from the start? He does, absolutely. I mean, really, as we heard from Richard earlier, the thing about his approach to archaeology is that he's interested in that idea

that the information about an object may be as important if not more important than the object itself. That affects all the objects he acquires, but it also affects how he works in the field. So after he begins as inspector of ancient monuments,

the first inspector of ancient monuments, he's enormously itinerant. He travels the country, he draws monuments occasionally he excavates monuments in order to understand what they are. And more than anything, I think, it's an approach which emerges out of his expertise in survey, earthwork survey. If you are able to draw a landscape or a site or monument at the level that he does,

you can compare in between sites. So the landscapes become exactly the same as objects. of types. And so as well as a typological approach to artefacts, you can have one to monuments. But can we, Richard Bradley, his view was challenged quite sternly

by an American, German-born American birds. Can you tell us how important that challenge was? Well, I think by the time Peter Rivers died in 1900, his view of material culture was pretty well obsolete

already. He the subject had moved on and actually in some ways so had pit rivers. One at a time, how was he obsolete already? Well, he had very little influence, I think, except on archaeology and except on techniques by the time he inherited Granborn Chase, the excitement of Darwin had passed, if you like,

because it was now accepted and it was also, I think, widely accepted that you can't take a Darwinian approach directly to material culture, which Darwin himself, of course, didn't approve of any way. So I think by the second part of his career, he'd really thrown himself very much into practical affairs. He hadn't lost his interest in Darwinism or evolution as a political tool through his museum displays,

but much of its attention was now devoted, not just to collecting but to excavating. He spent a great deal of money. He employed a permanent staff to do this on his own land and on other land too, and his neighbour's land. And I think by the end of his life, his original motivation had been very much diluted. He was really a very practical man.

And having established his identity as a scientist, I think he really was more concerned with the practical aspects. And that's what's lasted. of his legacy, naughty his theoretical thinking. Adam Guba, can you give us some idea how ideas which he'd held, we talked about the gradualism of evolution and the idea of the utility being a marker in history's evolution? Can you tell us how that was, according to Richard,

how that was swept away towards the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century? Well, there's a shift which is part of political shifts, I think, and part of theoretical shift, from looking at prehistory and looking at this long-term history on a global scale and looking at it nationally. So there's gradual development of interest to say

how did the Britons come to be as opposed to the Germans as opposed to the French rather than taking this worldview? So when you begin to look at culture areas and cultural history, then you begin to not look for these universal typologies

but look for the relationship. between different techniques within a particular local system. And this becomes the early 20th century model. They're good theoretical reasons for it. They're bad political reasons for it. But this is the shift. Do you agree with it? I mean, do you think it's a better model than his model?

And can you just explain a little bit more what you mean by the new idea you've introduced? The new idea is that to understand a way of life, it's very important to see the relationships between the different technologies people are using in the same area, in the same area, the same people and the relationship of these technologies to their thinking, to their architecture, to the ecology, and so on and so forth.

It forms some kind of local system. So you don't just take out things and put them with other things from other parts of the world. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. The famous Boas moment for this is Boers goes to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., which is organized really on the same principles as Pitt Rivers. And he's coming from the Northwest Coast and looking for Northwest Coast objects.

And he can't find them because they're in different rooms. Rattles or in one room with rattles and harpoons and other room with harpoons. And he writes an article to say, no, you should organize this in terms of culture area so we can see the relationships of objects to each other. And that's the theory that obtains still, is it? No. You give us all the three minutes You move to Act 3

All right, I'll give you a quick answer Yes and no In that, yes The old typologies Are no longer Really very useful But the idea of the culture area Is always in tension

With the idea of migrations And movements and changes That come from outside But he had a He has had strong influence on the practice and development of archaeology, as I understand, Dan Hicks. He certainly does, and I think he becomes a different ancestor for anthropology as compared with archaeology. In anthropology, he's relegated to the Victorian period, the museum period of anthropology, if you like. In archaeology, he's understood in terms of methodological contributions.

But really, you know, today, I think, though those, those issues that he raises about how we can write history with things. What is the temporal depth of objects around us in everyday life? What is the role of objects in sort of social life, sort of human life, are really among the most important issues that we address every day in the social sciences. Would you say Richard Bradley that his influence on anthropology was in any way significant? Because we come in a great time of Anthropology. Rogers, too late. Edward Tyler, we discussed this

a few weeks ago in the long series. It came out just 12 years or so after Darwin primitive anthropology. We're talking about a whole new body of work coming in, and he obviously, Pitt Rivers was interested in that and felt himself to be a part of it. Did he have any influence on it?

I don't think he did. I think his influence, curious enough, was in archaeology, and it was based on a misunderstanding of his methods by Mortimer Wheeler, who saw him as a a disciplinary ancestor, probably because they were both military men, both highly organised, highly ambitious.

And I think that is where his legacy continues, also, of course, protection of ancient monuments and museums, but not anthropology. The name, Mortimer Wheeler, would bring a pang and a smile to many people, including myself, his galvanic appearances on television.

So finally, where would you place him, Adam Cooper? A terrible question. A terrible question, but there you go. Very important answer, sir. Institutionally, extraordinary legacy left behind, intellectually finished. Wow. Well, that was called not mincing words. Any bids to put in there, obviously. If there was a final word, that is. Well, thank you very much to Adam Cooper, Richard Bradley and Dan Hicks. Next week we'll be talking about Absolute Zero, also known as...

absolute Kelvin, the lowest possible temperature. Thank you very much for listening. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.uk slash Radio 4.