General Pitt-Rivers, whose collection became the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, gave these lectures between the late 1860s and 1875 as an early attempt to apply evolutionary theory to things people make. He explains his principles of classification, then arranges shields, clubs, spears, arrows and other weapons in series to show how forms developed from simple beginnings.
A founding text of museum anthropology; its ranking of peoples as ‘primitive’ or advanced is very much of its Victorian moment. Download the free EPUB.