Wonderful to see so many families and children visiting the wonderland of anthropology that is Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum, reopened last week after its £1.5m overhaul. But talk about autres temps, autres moeurs — other times, other customs. Back in 1884, when the museum was built, General Augustus Pitt Rivers defined one of its main purposes as “to illustrate the arts of Prehistoric times, as far as practicable, by those existing savages in corresponding stages of civilisation”.

Hardly politically correct language, these days. And 106 years later, in 1990, the museum gave back some of the skeletal remains in its care to Australian aboriginal communities — who wanted the human remains of their ancestors returned. As a senior army officer, travelling to the farthest flung outposts of the British Empire at its zenith, Pitt Rivers had ample opportunity to collect things, and it is his haul that forms the basis of the museum’s collection.

Writing in the magazine The Ashmolean on the the Pitt Rivers’s 100th anniversary in 1984, Helene La Rue, then the museum’s ethnamusicologist, said: “His purpose in excavating was not mere acquisitiveness; through a careful study of the sites and everything found on them, he tried to discover how past peoples lived, interpreting his finds through analogies to the so-called ‘primitive societies’ that he knew.”

He was born in 1827 as Augustus Lane Fox. He assumed the additional surnames of Pitt Rivers in 1880 when he inherited a fortune from his great-uncle George Pitt, the second Baron Rivers. His collection of objects from around the world grew originally out of a study he made of how weapons evolved and improved. Then, as a result of this study, he began collecting early firearms before beginning to collect other things too.

The rooms of his London home were soon bulging with ‘specimens’ from all over the world: weapons, costumes, looms, and of course human remains. He decided a home should be found for his collection.

First it went to the Bethnal Green branch of the South Kensington Museum of Natural History, then to the main museum, before being offered to Oxford University on condition that a separate building be constructed to house it. Another condition was that someone be appointed to teach on subjects connected with the museum. The first person to hold this post was Sir Edward Tylor, who thus became the first teacher of anthropology at a British university.

He was succeeded by Henry Balfour, who had the job as curator of the museum from 1891 to 1935.

Throughout that long period he continued to add to the General’s collections, corresponding with many people in colonial service overseas, until the museum (like the General’s house before it) began to bulge at the seams.

From the beginning, Pitt Rivers saw the educational importance of museums and wanted his things to go on public display.

In an 1892 paper to the Society of Arts he wrote: “The knowledge of the facts of evolution, and of the great processes of gradual development, is the one great knowledge that we have to inculcate, and this knowledge can be taught by museums.”

But talking of wonderlands, Alice Liddell, the original Alice in Wonderland, the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, had taken a huge interest in the building of the University Museum. Indeed, the door leading from the University Museum, that wrought iron cathedral of natural history, to the Pitt Rivers Museum, was the inspiration for John Tenniel’s drawing of a door in Through the Looking Glass, surmounted by the words ‘Queen Alice’, where Alice was exasperated by the insubordination of a footman in the shape of a frog in livery.