A new plaque will be unveiled to honour a pioneering anthropologist and museum curator.
The blue plaque, to be unveiled by the Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board in association with the Pitt Rivers Museum, commemorates Beatrice Mary Blackwood.
It will be unveiled on May 29, at 3pm at 45 Walton Street, Oxford, where Ms Blackwood lived from 1930 to 1962.
Ms Blackwood, born in 1889 in Marylebone, was the daughter of publisher James Blackwood.
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She began her academic journey at Somerville College, Oxford, on a scholarship, studying English from 1908 to 1912, before pivoting to anthropology.
Her career as a field anthropologist took off in 1924 with research in North American communities.
In 1929, she embarked on a solo 18-month field trip to Buka and Bougainville in the Northern Solomon Islands, studying various aspects of local life.
Her work resulted in the seminal text, Both Sides of Buka Passage.
In 1936, she was appointed to the Pitt Rivers Museum as a University Demonstrator in Ethnology.
Under the auspices of the museum, she took a second field trip to Melanesia, working in New Guinea and New Britain for nearly 18 months.
Her exemplary fieldwork earned her the Rivers Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1943.
In 1939, following the death of the first curator of the Pitt Rivers, Ms Blackwood became a key figure in the museum, systematising its accession records and creating a comprehensive card catalogue.
Her work, The Classification of Artefacts in the Pitt Rivers Museum, published in 1970, became a model for other museums.
She passed away in 1975.
