สถานที่ตู้เครื่องรางและของขลัง พิพิธภัณฑ์พิตต์ริเวอร์สThe amulet and charm cases, Pitt Rivers Museum

The museum publishes the total: almost 6,000 amulets and charms in the collections, though not all of them are on display. They come from everywhere, England included.

The largest single block arrived by sale and then by transfer. Adrien de Mortillet, 1853–1931, son of the archaeologist Gabriel de Mortillet and later a lecturer and chair at the School of Anthropology in Paris, built an amulet collection drawn from five continents and from antiquity to the early twentieth century. In 1931, a few months before he died, he sold it to Henry Wellcome's museum in London. It was transferred to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1985. In 2012 the museum catalogued more than 2,500 of them under a project called Small Blessings, funded by Arts Council England's Designation Development Fund and running February to September that year, and put the records online.

The English cases owe a bank cashier. Edward Lovett swapped alpine plants grown in seashells for the charms Londoners had in their pockets and gave the results to Oxford; the museum's own England: The Other Within project counts 216 objects from him, 55 of them English, accessioned 1893 to 1911 — the encyclopedia gives the span as 1896 to 1911, and this record prints both rather than choosing. Walter Leo Hildburgh's amulets, bought across Europe, Asia and the Middle East, came by the same 1985 route out of Wellcome.

The cases are grouped by what an object does, not by where it is from, because the founder's 1884 Deed of Gift requires it: a clause says changes to the displays "shall not affect the general principle originated by Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers". The museum states plainly that this evolutionary approach to material culture is no longer appropriate in the modern display paradigm, and that it has kept the arrangement because the Deed does.

So it has gone at the labels instead. Labelling Matters, led by the director Laura Van Broekhoven with the research associate Marenka Thompson-Odlum and funded through the TORCH Heritage Seed Fund and Knowledge Exchange, reviews the language of the permanent displays; its stated aim is to "identify areas of improvement and to trial ways of changing our public texts where derogatory and other problematic language is used". In 2020 the museum took human remains off display, including the tsantsas shown since the 1940s. 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 shown in a case titled Treatment of Dead Enemies. That last one reaches these cases directly: the museum's own amulets guide describes an object made to be put in the spring of the Rengma Naga village of Tesophenyu, and lists what its wrappings hold.

The guide is careful about the claims and this atlas keeps its wording. It defines an amulet with the Oxford English Dictionary — "Anything worn about the person as a charm preventative against evil, mischief, disease, witchcraft, etc." — and explains sympathetic magic as meaning "that the appearance of an object resembles, in some way, the cure or protection it is believed to offer". Of the Maasai ivory amulet hung round a cow's neck it reports the Maasai term inkonyek, people with 'eyes', whose envious glance is held to be deadliest to young children and calves. Of a Yoruba ori box it records that the original owner assured the collector it was filled with 'juju' but could not say what was inside.

Inference — a case that puts a Naples cimaruta next to a Nagaland packet is making an argument, and the museum now argues with its own furniture.

On the Court floor, free, and still laid out on the founder's principle while the museum rewrites what is written on the cards. Displays are rotated, and the guide this record leans on was revised in March 2010 by Kate White, then Head of Access and Public Relations, so a case number is the museum's last published word and not a promise about today. This project has not stood in the Court.