Blackwood Papers

Papers of Beatrice Mary BLACKWOOD (1889-1975), anthropologist and museum curator

Beatrice Blackwood was a notable anthropologist and Pitt Rivers Museum staff member of the mid twentieth century. She was University Demonstrator and Lecturer in Ethnology at the University of Oxford between 1923 and 1959. The Museum’s seminar room is named the Blackwood Room in her honour.

The Blackwood Papers are the Pitt Rivers Museum’s largest manuscript collection, consisting of 54 boxes of material, relating especially to Blackwood’s research in Melanesia, Papua New Guinea and North America, as well as her work at the Pitt Rivers Museum from the mid 1930s.

Blackwood’s papers are a valuable resource for the study of the Museum’s collections and history, as well as an archive of the wide correspondence that she engaged in with scholars and museums around the world.

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Related Resources
Collections of objects, photographs, etc.: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

National Register of Archives: Blackwood, Beatrice Mary (1889-1975) Anthropologist Link to record (external site)

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Blackwood, Beatrice Mary (1889-1975), anthropologist Link to article (external site)

PRM biography: read

Film: A Stone Age People in New Guinea (1936-7) watch film

A Stone Age People in New Guinea (1936-7) from Pitt Rivers Museum on Vimeo.