Today we worked on firming up some of our upcoming tours and the students worked on their presentations. As Oxford is still experiencing open house, we did not have our usual session today. This afternoon, however we visited the Natural History Museum and the Pitt-Rivers Museum on Park Road.
These two museums are connected; the Natural Science museum has dinosaur skeletons as well as many preserved animals which trace the story of life on the planet. When one walks into the Pitt-Rivers, a dark and cool space, one encounters huge glass cases overwhelming the space. each one has artifacts from humans from around the world. They are grouped by type or function: musical instruments, baskets, shrunken heads (what one does to one’s enemies, representations of animals and humans.
In both spaces we look at our own history, our ‘relatives’ and fellow earth-dwellers, and we come to grips with the vast variety of human experience and how differently we see the world around us and organize our brief lives here.