organizationsThe Pitt Rivers Museum

The Deed of Gift set the terms. Oxford had to appoint a permanent lecturer in anthropology — Edward Burnett Tylor, in 1885, the first in the United Kingdom — and had to put up a building used for nothing else. Construction ran 1885 to 1886. A further clause says changes to the displays "shall not affect the general principle originated by Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers".

That is why the typological layout survived its own justification. The museum's account states that this evolutionary approach to material culture is no longer appropriate in the modern display paradigm for archaeological and anthropological objects, and that the original organisation has broadly been kept because the Deed requires it.

The amulet material arrived by two routes and they matter. Edward Lovett donated London street charms between 1896 and 1911. Walter Leo Hildburgh's amulets, bought across Europe, Asia and the Middle East, were bequeathed to the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum and transferred here in 1985.

Since 2020 the museum has changed what it shows. During the COVID closure it removed human remains from display, including the tsantsas shown since the 1940s; the director said that exhibiting them "reinforced racist and stereotypical thinking that goes against the museum's core values". It is meeting originating communities to correct its records and discuss returns — the Living Cultures work with the Maasai group Oltoilo Le Maa and InsightShare among them. With the Museum of Natural History it returned the remains of 17 Aboriginal Australians to the Australian government in 2022, and in 2026 agreed to repatriate Naga skeletal remains, some of which had been displayed in a case titled Treatment of Dead Enemies.

Collections Online is browsable and its images are not openly licensed. The museum's terms allow images to be used for non-commercial educational and community purposes and state that they "cannot be used freely or without permission for commercial purposes"; publication needs a licence application to photographic services, and credit must read "© Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford" with the object's accession number. No Creative Commons licence is named. Inference — this atlas can therefore cite a Pitt Rivers accession and link to it, and cannot host the picture.