บุคคลวอลเตอร์ ลีโอ ฮิลด์เบิร์กWalter Leo Hildburgh

Hildburgh took a doctorate at Columbia on alternating current, then spent his life on objects. The University of London gave him a D.Litt. in the History of Art in 1937. He gave or bequeathed over 5,000 objects to the Victoria and Albert Museum alone, and further material reached the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cooper Hewitt and the UCL Institute of Archaeology.

The amulets are the part that concerns this atlas, and they are also the part that moved. They went first to Henry Wellcome's museum, and in 1985 the whole Wellcome amulet material was transferred to Oxford. Inference — that means a tray of Spanish hands or Japanese charms catalogued as Pitt Rivers material may have been bought by an American in a Madrid street in 1906, passed through a pharmaceutical fortune's private museum in London, and only reached Oxford eighty years later. The label says Pitt Rivers. The object's history says four other things first.

He published on what he bought rather than only accumulating it: articles on cowrie shells as amulets, on hand images as amulets in Spain, and on the psychology he thought underlay amulet use in Europe.

Hildburgh's amulets are the bulk of what a visitor to the Pitt Rivers charm cases is looking at, and the Wellcome connection is why the same names recur in both institutions' catalogues. This project has read no published account of how individual pieces were acquired, and does not assert that any particular object was bought fairly or unfairly.