ENTHUSIASTIC visitors young and old travelled back thousands of years to celebrate the vast and diverse collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum.

The annual Pitt Fest attracted large crowds on Saturday as families saw demonstrations in casting bronze axes, dug deep for buried treasure and heard stories from the mists of time.

Its fifth incarnation also had live music throughout the day and a chance to meet archaeology experts and quiz them on their methods.

James Dilley, who runs his own business Ancient Craft, put on flint knapping demonstrations and casted bronze from a smoking furnace on the museum's lawn.

The experimental archaeologist heated up the furnace to 1200C and had children enthralled as he made a bronze axe head.

The 24-year-old, who lives in Faringdon, said: "It went really well, there was a huge number of people watching lots of different demonstrations."

"There were quite a lot of families at the festival but also group of tourists.

"Even before the festival got started we had a couple of visiting groups as the Pitt Rivers and Natural History Museum are big attractions in the city."

The University of Southampton PhD student has given talks and demonstrations at the museum before but said Saturday's festival attracted plenty more interest and intrigue.

He said: "I had a smoking furnace and animal skins laid out at the front of the museum and for one of the demonstrations there were probably about 50 people all squashed around - it was a great turnout."

Most of activities took place inside the museum where Senegalese musician Jali Fily Cissokho stole the show.

His 21-string West African kora - or harp - played away in one of the museum's many rooms of historic artefacts.

Museum staff led storytelling sessions, each inspired by different items in its rich catalogue, every hour from 11am until it the festival came to close at 4.30pm.

The Parks Road museum has 500,000 items - the largest collection of archaeological and anthropological items in the UK.

It was founded in 1884 by Lieutenant-General Augustus Pitt Rivers, who donated his 22,000-item collection to the University of Oxford.

Many of those items are stored at the University's museum storage depot in Osney Island.