Tony's Tour: Oxford- Pitt Rivers Museum, The Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Museum of History of Science

Today, we followed Tony to Oxford and visited several museums. There are Pitt Rivers Museum, The Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Museum of History of Science, and Modern Art Oxford.

Our first destination was Pitt Rivers. To get there, we went through Natural History Museum. These two buildings are connected together. 

Pitts Rivers Museum, founded by Lt-General Pitt Rivers in 1884, was an ethnographical museum. The objects in the museum are specially displayed typologically, grouped by their form or purpose, instead of following their geographical or cultural region. This is quite unusual compared with other museum, which gives us a new perspective to look all these objects. Apart from beautiful or valuable objects, the museum also houses objects for daily use, revealing the life of people in the past.

Numerous objects are kept in glass and wooden cabinets. For some bigger pieces, they are hung on the wall or suspended in the sky, like boats and big pieces of fabric. Ground floor was divided into sections like: basketry, rope and string, magic, ritual, religion and belief, vessels, musical instruments, treatment of the Dead, and so on. Personally, I found sections about magic, ritual and death are too scary, while vessels and instruments are most interesting. I can never imagined except vessels made of glass, wood, ceramic and metal, there are so many other types of vessels. It is exciting to see that depending on the region people lived, they tried hard to exploit the materials they could get. For example, people from tropical islands may use coconut shell as container. And these vessels even have aesthetic value, which were beautifully made. 

water container made of coconut shell

made of ostrich egg

leave?

made of bamboo

I found this in the basketry section. It is full of delicate details and adorable form.

As an ancient Africa doll, this one with a mellow body and warm smile, looks so cute.

I found these fans and feather works in the following images in the second floor. Many of them are quite unusual that can be a nice reference in the future.

This one was made of leather, how curious.

And these astonishing feather hats.

The one below is a traditional technique of making hair decor. The crucial material was kingfisher's feather, which has gleamy vibrant blue. It is now illegal to do so, because the kingfishers are rare and precious today. Not a long time ago, I saw someone online find a way to mimic this effect by replacing the feather with blue silk ribbon.

These are some odd sun glasses. You have to admit that people invented some really odd things. Some of them even look like laser eyes in the movie.

After lunch, we went to the Museum of History of Science.

Most collections in the museum are astronomical instruments. Recently, due to several reasons, my theme becomes something about cosmology. Before I went to the museum, I happened to review some basic knowledge about cosmology. So these instruments are quite relevant. There are the model s for geocentric theory, heliocentric theory, sundials from various countries, and so on.

This one shows the map on the earth as well as the corresponding celestial map.  

This one shows that in Indian Methodology, our land is a sphere and supported by elephants.

As a background research, it is important to know what happened and how people thought in the past, in different regions. And it can be really helpful for me to see them in real after reading. In this way, I can understand the research I did better. And among all the information and knowledge, I need to find the one that can support my project.

On the way back home, I had a nice conversation with our new classmate Angelique. She is a Phd in Physics, and she said she will send me a reading list about cosmology, which is really helpful.