Pitt-Rivers, the Painter and the Palaeolithic Period (original) (raw)

As part of the Rethinking Pitt-Rivers Project, staff at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford were invited to write object biographies about items in the museum’s founding collection. I was drawn to an Early Dynastic Period ripple-flaked knife published by Pitt-Rivers himself in an article for the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1881 after a trip he made to Egypt earlier that year. His paper was significant because it established that there was a Palaeolithic Period of Egyptian history when the existence of a prehistoric phase there had not yet been accepted. In a footnote, Pitt-Rivers wrote that he acquired the knife from “Mr McCallum, the artist” in 1874. Although his name is spelled differently in different places, I am convinced this was Andrew MacCallum (1821-1902), the “Painter” with whom Amelia Edwards famously sailed a thousand miles up the Nile in the same year. MacCallum was a landscape painter who wanted to paint the Ramesses Temple at Abu Simbel and, while there, discovered a shrine or painted chamber, which Edwards dedicated a whole chapter to.