Collecting things, collecting people

Ok so this should have been posted way back along with my writing on 'What would you collect to symbolise how you think about life?'. In our lecture from Clare Rose, on November 5th 2010 she talked about how people have collected things throughout time and the different reasons for which people have treasured certain things. We discussed a huge range of objects large and smalls that have been collected and kept in a somewhat in a somewhat controversial way. More on that later. Museums originated from personal collections and were very often a means of showing your wealth and extensive travels. Whether or not these collections were merely a display of status once upon a time for the collector, they are hugely important to us today because they document a period of time. The collections displaying wealth and status were known from the 1500s as 'Cabinets of Curiosities'. It was incredibly fashionable for the upper class to acquire objects of interest from around the world from as many exotic places as possible. One man who broke this tradition of collecting things that were beautiful or unique was Augustus Pitt Rivers. His insistence on collecting the everyday objects was his most important methodological innovation and it has in many respects shaped museums' collections since. Another massive innovation of his was to arrange items typologically- by what they were in order to highlight the evolutionary trends in human artefacts. Within these collections based on type they were also arranged chronologically. The several thousand objects he collected in his lifetime have been added to since to form a collection of roughly half a million and they now form the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.