Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-x4r87 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T23:37:23.029Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Engineering the past: Pitt Rivers, Nemo and The Needle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Christopher Evans
Christopher Evans*
Affiliation:
*Cambridge Archaeological Unit, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, UK (Email: cje30@cam.ac.uk)
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Exploring parallels between the careers of Lt.-General Pitt Rivers and Verne's Captain Nemo, this essay is concerned with time and disciplinary flagships. It considers how their respective collection activities propelled their very personal projects of science and, in the case of the General, its interrelationship with the institutionalisation of archaeology in the later nineteenth century. In particular, the implications of his renowned excavation medallion will be discussed and compared to a celebrated time capsule of the period; it being argued that ‘deep time’ consciousness itself engendered notions of futuristic projection.

Type
Debate
Information
Antiquity , Volume 80 , Issue 310 , 1 December 2006 , pp. 960 - 969
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arnold, K. & Olsen, D.. 2003. Introduction, in Arnold, K. & Olsen, D. (ed.) Medicine Man: The Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome: 29–47. London: British Museum Press.Google ScholarPubMed
Bacon, E. (ed.). 1976. The Great Archaeologists. London: Secker & Warburg.Google Scholar
Ball, A. 1978. Cleopatra's Needle: The Story of 100 years in London. Havant, Hants: K. Mason.Google Scholar
Barrett, J., Bradley, R., Bowden, M. & Mead, B.. 1983. South Lodge after Pitt Rivers. Antiquity 57: 193–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bowden, M. 1991 Pitt Rivers: The life and archaeological work of Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, DCL, FRS, FSA. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bradley, R. 1983. Archaeology, evolution and the public good: the intellectual development of General Pitt Rivers. Archaeological Journal 140: 1–9.Google Scholar
Cannadine, D. 2001. Ornamentalism: How the British saw their Empire. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Chesneaux, J. 1972. The Political and Social Ideas of Jules Verne. London: Thames & Hudson.Google Scholar
Dudley Buxton, L.H. (ed.). 1929. The Pitt Rivers Museum: General Handbook. Farnham: Farnham Museum.Google Scholar
Evans, C. 1994. ‘Digging with the Pen’: Novel Archaeologies and literary traditions, in Tilley, C. (ed.) Interpretative Archaeology: 417–47. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
Evans, C. 1995. Archaeology against the state: Roots of internationalism, in Ucko, P. (ed.) Theory in Archaeology: a world perspective: 312–26. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Evans, C. 2000. Megalithic Follies: Soane's ‘Druidic Remains’ and the display of monuments. Journal of Material Culture 5: 347–66.Google Scholar
Evans, C. 2004. Modelling Monuments and Excavations, in de Chadarevian, S. & Hopwood, N. (ed.) Models: The Third Dimension of Science: 109–37. Stanford (CA): Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, C. forthcoming 2007. ‘Delineating Objects’ – Nineteenth Century Antiquarian Culture and the Project of Archaeology, in Pearce, S. (ed.) Visions of Antiquity: A Tri-centenary Celebration of the Society of Antiquaries of London. London: Society of Antiquaries.Google Scholar
Evans, J. 1943. Time and Chance: The story of Arthur Evans and his Forebears. London: Longmans Green & Co.Google Scholar
Farmer, J.S. 1973. The Other Log of Phileas Fogg. New York: Daw Books.Google Scholar
Freeman, M. 2004. Victorians and the Prehistoric. London: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Gombrich, E.H. 1972. The Visual Image. Scientific American 227: 82–96.Google Scholar
Hodder, I. 1989. Writing Archaeology: The site report in context. Antiquity 63: 268–74.Google Scholar
Jarvis, W. 2002. Time Capsules. Jefferson (NC): McFarland & Co.Google Scholar
Levine, P. 1986. The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lowenthal, D. 1985. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lucas, G. 2004. The Archaeology of Time. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
McConnell, F. 1981. The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Moore, A. 2002. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Boston (MA): DC Comics.Google Scholar
Murray, T. 1993. Archaeology, ideology and the threat of the past: Sir Henry Rider Haggard and the acquisition of time. World Archaeology 25: 175–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murray, T. (ed.). 1999. Time and Archaeology (One World Archaeology Series, vol. 37). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Petch, A. 1998. ‘Man as he was and Man as he is’: General Pitt Rivers' collection. Journal of the History of Collections 10: 75–85.Google Scholar
Petch, A. 2002. Assembling and Arranging: Pitt Rivers' collections from 1850 to now. Collectors: Expressions of Self and Other. Occasional Papers Series: Horniman Museum and Museu Antropological of the University of Coimbra.Google Scholar
Pitt Rivers, Lt-Gen.A.H.L.F. 1858. On the improvement of the rifle as a weapon for general use. Journal of the Royal United Services Institution 2: 453–88.Google Scholar
Pitt Rivers, Lt-Gen.A.H.L.F. 1861. On a model illustrating the parabolic theory of projection in vacuo . Journal of the Royal United Services Institution 5: 497–501.Google Scholar
Pitt Rivers, Lt-Gen.A.H.L.F. 1867. Primitive Warfare, part I. Journal of the United Services Institution 11: 612–45.Google Scholar
Pitt Rivers, Lt-Gen.A.H.L.F. 1868. Primitive Warfare, part II. Journal of the United Services Institution 12: 399–439.Google Scholar
Pitt Rivers, Lt-Gen.A.H.L.F. 1891. Typological Museums. Journal of the Society of Arts 40: 115–22.Google Scholar
Stocking, G.W. Jr. 1987. Victorian Anthropology. London: Collier Macmillan.Google Scholar
Sweet, R. 2004. Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London: Hambledon & London.Google Scholar
Thomas, F.W.L. 1851. Account of some Celtic Antiquities of Orkney. Archaeologia 34: 88–136.Google Scholar
Thomas, J. 2004. Archaeology and Modernity. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Thompson, M.W. 1977. General Pitt-Rivers: Evolution and archaeology in the Nineteenth Century. Bradford-on-Avon: Moonraker Press.Google Scholar
Thompson, M. & Renfrew, C.. 1999. The catalogues of the Pitt-Rivers Museum, Farnham, Dorset. Antiquity 73: 377–92.Google Scholar
Verne, J. 1871. Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers. Tour du monde sous-marin (Illustrated by A. de Neuville & Riou). Paris: J. Hetzel.Google Scholar
Wheeler, M. 1954. Archaeology from the Earth. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
White, R. 1990. Notes on the Underground: An Essay of Technology, Society and the Imagination. Cambridge (MA): Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.Google Scholar
Woodward, C. 1999. Catalogue, in Visions of Ruin: Architectural fantasies and designs for garden follies: 18–50. London: Sir John Soane's Museum.Google Scholar