Augustus Pitt Rivers

Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers (1827 to 1900) was an English army officer, ethnologist and archaeologist, noted for innovations in archaeological methodology and in the museum display of archaeological and ethnological collections. Born Augustus Lane Fox at Bramham in Yorkshire, he served in the Grenadier Guards over a military career of thirty two years, then adopted the Pitt Rivers name in 1880 on inheriting the Cranborne Chase estates. Influenced by the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, he arranged his collection of tens of thousands of objects typologically and chronologically, to show developmental sequences that supported his views on cultural evolution; in 1884 the University of Oxford accepted his gift of more than 20,000 objects, the founding collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum. On his own estates he excavated over seventeen seasons, insisting that all artefacts, not just beautiful ones, be collected and catalogued, and he is widely regarded as the first scientific archaeologist to work in Britain. He became the first Inspector of Ancient Monuments and died in 1900.