Augustus Pitt Rivers

Augustus Pitt Rivers (1827-1900)

Lieutenant General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers (born April 14, 1827 near Bramham , Yorkshire , † May 4, 1900 in Rushmore , Wiltshire ) was a British ethnologist and archaeologist and is known because of the system he developed for classifying and evaluating archaeological finds as the "Father of British Archeology".

Live and act

Augustus Pitt Rivers was born Augustus Henry Lane Fox to the landowner William Lane Fox and his wife Lady Caroline, a Scottish noblewoman, at Hope Hall near Bramham, northeast of Leeds .

From 1841 Pitt Rivers attended the Sandhurst Military Academy , which he left in 1845 to serve in the Grenadier Guards . During his service he was stationed in Ireland , Canada and Malta and also fought briefly as a lieutenant in the Crimean War at the siege of Sevastopol .

When Pitt Rivers inherited Baron Rivers' extensive estates from his uncle Henry Pitt Baron Rivers in 1880, and with it a large part of the property of the Rigby family, he changed his name in his honor.

In 1882, Pitt Rivers was retired as Lieutenant General. In the same year he was appointed "Inspector of Ancient Monuments" on the initiative of his son-in-law John Lubbock .

Pitt Rivers developed his interest in ethnology and archeology during the years of his missions abroad in the British Army. He became a recognized expert in the field. Within five years he was appointed a member of the Ethnological Society of London (1861), the Society of Antiquaries of London (1864) and the Anthropological Society of London (1865).

At the end of his military career, Pitt Rivers had amassed an ethnographic collection with over ten thousand individual items, most of which, however, were not collected on site, but purchased at auctions. Influenced by the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer , he arranged the collection typologically and chronologically within this order. This systematization, which chronologically showed the evolution of individual artifacts, was a revolutionary innovation in the presentation of exhibits in museums.

Pitt Rivers carried out extensive archaeological excavations on his lands, which he inherited in 1880 and which were rich in historical material from the Roman and Anglo-Saxon periods of England , from the mid-1880s until his death. By the standards of the time, his work was extremely meticulous and he is widely considered to be the first British archaeologist to work on a strictly scientific basis. The essential aspect of his job was that he insisted on collecting and cataloging all artifacts and not just the "beautiful" or "unique" ones. This approach and method of collecting everyday objects broke with the archaeological research that was often common up to that point, which was more like a "treasure hunt".

In his role as Historic Monuments Inspector, Pitt Rivers was responsible for cataloging and preserving archaeological sites in Britain. Although he pursued this goal with his own methodology, he often encountered legal difficulties, as he had little authority over landowners on whose basis these sites were to prevent the monuments from being destroyed.

The Pitt Rivers collections form the basis of the exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum , which is one of the main attractions in Oxford .

literature

• Mark C. Bowden: General Pitt-Rivers: The Father of Scientific Archeology . Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, Salisbury 1984
• Mark C. Bowden: Pitt Rivers: The Life and Archaeological Work of Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1991
• MW Thompson: General Pitt-Rivers: Evolution and Archeology in the Nineteenth Century . Moonraker Press, 1977

Web links

Commons : Augustus Pitt Rivers  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford

Individual evidence

1. ^ Minnesota State University (biography): Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers ( Memento June 3, 2010 in the Internet Archive ).