General Fox-Pitt-Rivers: catalogues of his collections.

Augustus Henry Lane Fox (1827-1900), who assumed the name Fox-Pitt-Rivers in 1880 on succeeding to the estates of his great uncle, the 2nd Baron Rivers, was an officer in the Grenadier Guards who served in the Crimean War and rose to the rank of Lieutenant-General, and an archaeologist and anthropologist. He was first Inspector of ncient Monuments in Great Britain. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1864 and was Vice-President in 1871; he was also President of the Archaeological Institute. His post-1880 estate was at Rushmore, and three miles away, at Farnham, he created a museum for his post-1880 collections. His obituary commended his systematic and careful recording of excavations and explorations, especially five volumes of full details of his work on his Rushmore estate. Most of his collection of weapons and articles of dress, ornaments etc., from all parts of the world, is in the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford. The contents of the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Farnham were dispersed in the mid-1970s: the British collections passed to the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum; the ethnographic collections were dispersed by sale.

9 volumes, 1882-99, chronological catalogues of antiquities and ethnographical material: date of acquisition / article and description / price / location in various residences ('Place where it might be found', annotated to show rearrangement of collection, later 'Deposited at' / 'Transferred to'), many items illustrated with pen-and-wash drawings by G.F. Waldo Johnson and others.

Presented by the Pitt-Rivers Trust (senior family member G.Anthony Pitt-Rivers) per Professor Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, 1997. Item [10] presented by G. Anthony Pitt-Rivers, 2004.

Please cite as Cambridge University Library, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, General Fox-Pitt-Rivers: catalogues of his collections., MS Add.9455

For an obituary of Pitt-Rivers, see Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries, xviii, p.338. See also Michael Thompson and Colin Renfrew, 'The catalogues of the Pitt-Rivers Museum, Farnham, Dorset' in Antiquity 73 (1999).