Pitt Rivers Museum

The Pitt Rivers Museum, reached through the back of the Oxford Natural History Museum on Parks Road, is one of the most extraordinary museums in Britain. It is an anthropological and archaeological collection gathered in the Victorian period, displayed in what appears to be deliberate Victorian chaos: glass cases crammed with objects from floor to ceiling, cases within cases, objects hanging from the roof and laid in piles within open drawers. The effect is astonishing — like walking into a vast cabinet of curiosities.

The museum holds around half a million objects from all over the world: weapons, ceremonial masks, textiles, musical instruments, religious objects, and everyday tools from hundreds of cultures. The layout is thematic rather than geographic — so Stone Age tools from Britain sit next to equivalent objects from Papua New Guinea, and you are invited to think about what they share. The museum is free, and the Natural History Museum immediately in front of it — with its spectacular cast-iron roof and its resident T. rex skeleton — is also free and worth a visit.

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Among the Pitt Rivers' most notorious exhibits are its shrunken heads — tsantsas, made by the Shuar people of Ecuador and Peru — which were for decades displayed with placards describing how the process was done. In 2020, the museum withdrew all human remains from display, sparking a genuine public debate about whether this removed important ethnographic context or simply corrected a long-standing exploitation of indigenous cultures. The heads remain in the collection but off public view.

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