Pitt Rivers Museum

The only way into the Pitt Rivers Museum is through the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, whose rear it adjoins. Inside are the University of Oxford's archaeological and anthropological collections. They have grown from an original gift of about 22,000 items to more than 600,000, including major photographic holdings. Nearly all of it arrived as donations from colonial officials, travellers, scholars and missionaries.

The museum dates from 1884, when Augustus Pitt Rivers gave his private collection to the university on two conditions. The first was that a permanent lecturer in anthropology be appointed, which made Edward Burnett Tylor the first in the UK, and museum staff still teach archaeology and anthropology at the university. The second was that a building be provided for the collection and used for nothing else. The result is the present Grade I listed building, designed by Thomas Manly Deane, son of one of the natural history museum's architects, and completed in 1886.