We consider how far different 'networks of connection' have structured the relationships between curators, collectors and objects at the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University. Museum collections are generated through complicated, fluctuating circulations of people and things that are literally endless and, when there is a high standard of computerized documentation, network analysis can be a stimulating and revealing methodological tool. Network analysis can reveal patterns in sets of social relationships that are too large to process or analyse mentally, and it can be a spur to more indepth, nuanced research. An introduction to network theory and a consideration of 'network' as a metaphor for social and material interactions more broadly is followed by a discussion of our research into the history of the Pitt Rivers Museum and an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of network analysis as a research tool in the museum context. ArticlesIn this article we consider how different 'networks of connection' illuminate and provoke the analysis of the relationships between curators, collectors and objects during the early history of the Pitt Rivers Museum. When faced with a complicated, shifting circulation of people and things that is literally endless -as is the case when considering the history of a museum, a person's life, a business or a laboratory -network analysis can be a stimulating and revealing methodological tool. It can show patterns in sets of social relationships that are beyond normal reasoning, and it can be a spur to more in-depth, nuanced research.This article is the result of work undertaken during 'The Relational Museum' project, a research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. The project team explored the history of the Museum, focusing on a roughly 60-year period following its founding in 1884, with the aim of investigating a range of collecting networks and relationships that have shaped the institution over the years and of providing a window on contrasting geographical, disciplinary, social and historical contexts. Although our research work concentrated on six individual collectors -Augustus Henry we were quickly confronted by a daunting mass of information concerning thousands of collectors and donors who have contributed to the Museum's development, and the thousands and thousands of objects with which they were associated. All these people and things were interconnected to varying degrees in complex ways (Petch, 2004).

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This article explores the material legacy of Henry Wellcome . Wellcome worked closely with objects throughout his life, both as a businessman and as a collector. These objects have biographical significance. In his relationships with things, Wellcome was drawn to the miniature and the gigantic. As a founding partner of the pharmaceuticals firm Burroughs Wellcome and Company, he designed 'compressed medicines' that were valued for their convenience and small size. They embody Wellcome's methodical, perfectionist nature. But, as a museum collector, he created a collection that was so enormous it became unmanageable and was left unfinished. This article seeks to reconcile these two aspects of Wellcome's interactions with things, and argues that Wellcome's professional work manufacturing pharmaceutical products on a miniature scale sheds light on his actions as a collector who created a truly gigantic assemblage of artefacts.

Recent work by Alfred Gell echoes research methodologies used by anthropologists a century ago, when the new university discipline of anthropology was construed as a scientific subject. The early history of anthropology at Oxford University is explored with particular reference to Henry Balfour's work as curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the turn of the 20th century. Balfour and Gell both paid close attention to the formal qualities of things in an attempt to chart the linking threads of design and form which structure ‘distributed objects’. Balfour was concerned with human origins, while Gell tracked shifting ‘networks of transformational relationships’ with no origin, but their methodologies show similarities because they both prioritized the physicality of things. Exploring the strengths and weaknesses of an earlier, scientific approach to people and things helps us to understand and reassess our own intellectual (and material) ancestry.

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