The Theory
From the evolution of the rifle to the evolution of culture: one idea, carried from Woolwich to Oxford.
The central idea of Pitt-Rivers's intellectual life was disarmingly simple: human inventions evolve. Watching the rifle improve during his musketry years, he reasoned that forms do not appear out of nothing — each is a small modification of what came before, and each will be a small modification of what follows. He absorbed Darwin and Herbert Spencer, and extended their reasoning from species to artefacts. Weapons, tools, pottery, looms, boats, clothing, musical instruments, art, writing: all could be arranged in series showing the sequence of development.
The consequence was practical as well as philosophical. If artefacts evolve, then a museum could be arranged to show that evolution — and in doing so, to teach the history of human thought more directly than any book. The missing links of the series, where archaeology could not supply them, could be filled by the survivals of "existing savages", as he called the living peoples whose crafts preserved earlier stages of invention. This linkage of archaeology with ethnology was, in the judgement of later scholars, his most important scientific contribution.
The word itself
Pitt-Rivers believed he had coined "typology":
"It is not an accepted term, and I am not aware that it has been applied before to the study of the sequence of the types of the arts. But it appears to me that a name is wanted for this branch of investigation, which the term ‘Typology’ supplies."
The Oxford English Dictionary, notably, credits the term to a later archaeologist, V. Gordon Childe (1929) — but the method is Pitt-Rivers's.
The evolution of culture
The landmark statement, 1875.
In his paper On the Principles of Classification adopted in the Arrangement of his Anthropological Collection, read before the Anthropological Institute on 1 July 1874 and published in 1875, he set out the purpose of the collection with total clarity. It was gathered "not for the purpose of surprising any one, either by the beauty or value of the objects exhibited, but solely with a view to instruction."
"The collection... has been collected during upwards of twenty years, not for the purpose of surprising any one, either by the beauty or value of the objects exhibited, but solely with a view to instruction. For this purpose ordinary and typical specimens, rather than rare objects, have been selected and arranged in sequence, so as to trace, as far as practicable, the succession of ideas by which the minds of men in a primitive condition of culture have progressed from the simple to the complex, and from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous."
The object of the museum
Not a toy-shop of curiosities.
Against the curiosity cabinet
The old museum gathered rarities to astonish. He gathered the ordinary to instruct, because only the ordinary forms a sequence.
Against the geographical system
Arrangement by region told where an object came from; arrangement by type told how the human mind had worked. He chose the latter, always.
The developmental series
The simpler forms stand to the left, the successive improvements in line to the right — the whole history of an idea laid out on a shelf.
An open system
He wrote that he could not conceive any idea of finality in a museum: the sequence itself was subject to the law of development it displayed.
"When, as in the case of most prehistoric objects and many of the arts of savage nations, the dates cannot be given, then recourse must be had to the sequence of type, and that is what I term 'Typology'... It supplies the want of dates by showing how certain forms must have preceded or followed others in the order of their development."