British Museum (Natural History): Department of Palaeontology: Anthropology Sub-Department:...

This series contains the correspondence of the Sub-Department of Anthropology of the Department of Paleontology, British Museum (Natural History) and its predecessors.

Letters in the collection deal with the donation, purchase, exchange and disposal of human remains and artifacts, anthropological enquiries from members of the public, and research correspondence with fellow anthropologists.

Series held at The Natural History Museum are catalogued more fully in its online catalogue . Online descriptions of some individual records can also be viewed on Discovery, see DF 140.

Topics

Museums and galleries

Anthropology was first studied within the Osteology Section of the Department of Zoology, and items 1-4 date from that period. William Plane Pycraft (1868-1942) was Head of the Section from 1907 until his retirement in 1932, when he was succeeded by Francis Charles Fraser (1903-1978). In 1949 it was decided to appoint an anthropologist to take charge of both the recent and fossil collections. No suitable external candidate was found, and in 1953 Kenneth Page Oakley (1911-1981), a member of the Department of Geology with responsibility for fossil man and some invertebrate groups, was given the post. The new Anthropology Section spanned the departments of Zoology and Geology, though Oakley himself remained in Geology. In 1959 the Section was given the status of a sub-department, and in 1960 it was placed within the Department of Palaeontology, and the collection of recent anthropological specimens transferred accordingly. The staff of the Sub-Department consisted of Oakley, Mrs Madeleine Smith, Miss Rosemary Powers, and three part-time workers.

The work of the Sub-Department was extended in 1972 when a Serology Unit was set up to investigate the biology of living populations using serological and biochemical variation. Donald Tills (1934-1993) was appointed as Head of the Section, having previously been deputy to Dr A E Mourant at the Serological Population Genetics Laboratory, St Bartholomew's Hospital, London.