Augustus Pitt Rivers
Lieutenant-General Augustus Pitt Rivers (* April 14, 1827 at Bramham, Yorkshire, † May 4, 1900 in Rushmore, Wiltshire ) was a British anthropologist and archeologist and is for the sake of his development of the Nomenclature for the classification and evaluation of archaeological finds as the "father British archeology ", respectively.
Life and work
Augustus Pitt Rivers was born as Augustus Henry Lane Fox, the son of a rich landowner William Lane Fox and his wife, Lady Caroline, a Scottish nobleman, on Hope Hall at Bramham in Yorkshire north-east of Leeds.
From 1841 he attended the Military Academy Sandhurst, which he left in 1845 to serve in the Grenadier Guards. During his service he was stationed in Ireland, Malta and Canada and fought for a short time as a lieutenant in the Crimean War at the siege of Sevastopol.
When he in 1880 by his uncle Henry Pitt, Baron Rivers inherited his extensive lands, and thus a large part of the assets of the Rigby family, he changed his name to honor him.
In 1882 he was transferred as a Lieutenant General in retirement. In the same year he was appointed on the initiative of his son John Lubbock for " inspector of historical monuments " ( Inspector of Ancient Monuments ).
His interest in anthropology and archeology developed Pitt Rivers in the years of his foreign missions in the British Army, he became a recognized expert in this field. Within five years, he was appointed as a member of the Ethnological Society of London (1861 ), the Society of Antiquaries of London (1864 ) and the Anthropological Society of London (1865 ).
At the end of his military career, he had an ethnographic collection of over ten thousand individual pieces from around the world gathered, most of which, however, not even collected on site, but were purchased at auctions. Influenced by the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, he ordered the collection typologically and chronologically within this order. This systematization, which showed the chronological evolution of individual artifacts, was a revolutionary innovation in the presentation of exhibits in museums.
Pitt Rivers performed on his 1880 inherited lands that were rich in historical material from the Roman and Anglo- Saxon period of England, extensive from the mid 1880s until his death in archaeological excavations. Measured by the standard at that time his approach was very meticulous and he is generally regarded as the first British archaeologist who worked on a strictly scientific basis. The essential aspect of his work was that he insisted on collecting all artifacts and to catalog and not only the " beautiful " or " unique". This approach and method for the collection of everyday objects also broke with the up to the time often usual way of archaeological research, more than "treasure hunt" presented itself.
In his position as inspector of historical monuments, he was responsible for cataloging and preservation of archaeological sites in the UK. Although he pursued that goal with the methodology him own, he came often to legal difficulties, since he had little authority over landowners on whose basis lay these sites to prevent the monuments were destroyed.
The collections of Pitt Rivers form the basis of the exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum, which is one of the main attractions in Oxford.