[article ID:435]

What type of things did they collect?

Where did they collect from?

Note that these statistics were prepared when we were not sure whether to choose John Henry Hutton or James Phillip Mills as our sixth named collector. In the event Hutton was chosen but these statistics are given anyway.

Because Hutton and Mills field collected such a large proportion of their donations (Hutton collected all but 177 of the objects in his donation (95 per cent), Mills collected all but 26 object from his donation (more than 99 per cent)) there is very little variation between the totals for each class depending on whether they collected it themselves or not we have therefore not bothered to calculate the percentages for th eunchanged classes (even though we accept the proportions would be slightly different as the total number of objects is different), the only percentages we have worked out for the donor column is those marked in blue which are different from the field collector totals. In instances where the total for the class has gone DOWN between field collector and donor columns this means the object came to us via another donor.

Significant collections (those over 10 per cent of the total number of objects) as with other named collectors, are marked in red. If a class name is highlighted in red it means both Hutton and Mills collected significant number s of that class

Summary

Hutton - the classes which have most objects represented in the Hutton collection are weapons (nearly a aquarter of the entire Hutton collection), ornament and bead, status and clothing.

Mills - the same types of objects were priorities in the Mills collection except that he has a great number of textiles (unlike Hutton)

Neither collector has a significant collection of stone tools unlike the global collections.

Where did the collections come from?

A very high percentage of Hutton and Mills material was collected or donated and provenanced to India (or 'British India']:

Hutton's other consists of items from Burma, Nepal, Sri Lanka (Burma is source of most).

Mills' is more mixed with items also coming from Micronesia, Africa, UK and Australia as well as Asia

The domination of Indian objects from both collectors is of course because of their Nagaland collections.

Discussion of Mills and Hutton

We did not think we should have both Hutton and Mills as their collections are very similar (see above) with exactly the same classes not represented in their collections and exactly the same typological strengths (with the exception of textiles that Mills collected much more vociferously than Hutton). Mills also collected more in one other specific place - Bangladesh. However both their collections are very similar taken at a macro level, they were collected principally in the same very small geographical area (Nagaland, in NE India) and at about the same time (Hutton started collecting slightly earlier, and Mills collected later - but broadly they collected in the early twentieth century). Both Hutton and Mills were career civil servants working for the Indian Civil Service, and both of them, after retirement from that service, worked as academic anthropologists in this country (Hutton at Cambridge and Mills at London). Their careers are also very similar therefore. Both of them published monographs about the Naga peoples, We believe that Hutton published more than Mills. We also have both their photographic collections though we have much more of Hutton than Mills (whose main photographic collections are elsewhere). A fair amount has been published about the Naga collections.

ESRC Relational Museum

23.10.03