Pitt Rivers Museum, looking east across the Court

Interior view of the Pitt Rivers Museum, looking towards the east end of the Court.

Photographer: Alfred Robinson
Date of photograph: Circa 1901
Continent: Europe
Geographical area: Northern Europe
Country: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Region/Place: England; Oxfordshire; Oxford
Format: Black and white print (mounted on card)
Size: 156 x 208 mm; 247 x 311 mm (with mount)
Acquisition: Internal accession

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Exhibition label: ‘To the right are three photographs of the totem pole taken soon after it was installed in the Court of the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1901. The exact date of the pole being raised in the Museum is not known, but an account in the Oxford Magazine mentions that on 22 November “there was a large gathering at the Museum to hear Dr. Tylor’s lecture on ‘Totems and Totemism’”; and it can be surmised that the post was already in its present position by this time. In his article published shortly afterwards in the journal Man, Tylor noted: “The post stood till last year in the remarkable row of such posts in front of the chiefs’ houses. It is carved from the trunk of the great British Columbian tree, hollowed at the back to be more readily raised into its place when finished. [...] Its present height, after its being sawn across near the ground and set on a base in the Pitt Rivers Museum, is a little over 40 feet, not far from the original height.”’ Source: ‘Star House Pole: Early Images of the Haida Totem Pole in the Pitt Rivers Museum’, exhibition curated by Philip Grover, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 9 June to 28 September 2014.

Research notes: It has been established by Philip Grover that this photograph was taken shortly after the installation of the Haida totem pole (‘Star House Pole’) in the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1901. The exact date of the totem pole being put up in the Museum is not known, but one can deduce that it was in position by the time Professor Edward Burnett Tylor gave a lecture on ‘Totems and Totemism’ on 22 November 1901, as reported in the Oxford Magazine, 20 (27 November 1901), pp.108–109. Another photograph of the totem pole, which was presumably taken around the same time as this, was reproduced in Tylor’s article on the pole, published shortly afterwards in the journal Man: E. B. Tylor, ‘Note on the Haida Totem-Post Lately Erected in the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Man: A Monthly Record of Anthropological Science, 2 (1902), pp.1–3.