User:Ajpappin/sandbox

Early Career
Beatrice Blackwood, born in London in 1889, completed a degree in English Literature and Language at Somerville College, Oxford from 1908-1912. After returning to Oxford later to study anthropology in 1916, she began a career working in the Human Anatomy Department at Oxford. Beginning working as a research assistant to Arthur Thomson in 1918, Blackwood then began teaching physical anthropology and working with anatomy collections as a Departmental Demonstrator. In 1924, Blackwood travelled to North America on a Laura Spelman Rockefeller Fellowship to study anthropology in Native American, African-American, Asian and Caucasian societies. During this time, Blackwood collected items to add to the Pitt Rivers Museum collection and contributed to a survey conducted by the National Research Council.

Late Career
Blackwood was promoted to a University Demonstrator position in the Human Anatomy Department at Oxford upon her return in 1928. A year later, she received funding from the National Research Council and travelled to New Guinea for 18 months, where she worked in the Northern Solomon Islands. This research was eventually published in a book "Both Sides of Buka Passage" in 1935. In 1936, Blackwood became the University Demonstrator in Ethnology at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and at that same time, she conducted her second field study abroad, this time in Melanesia. While travelling, she gathered over 2,000 materials to add to the collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Upon returning to Oxford in 1938, Blackwood was appointed to run the Pitt Rivers Museum along with a colleague, Tom Penniman. The two, along with volunteers, created a system to organize accession records of the Museum and catalogued all objects in the collections. In 1946, Blackwood was designated as a Lecturer in Ethnology and continued to teach archaeology and anthropology to Oxford students seeking a Diploma in Anthropology.

Late Life
Blackwood retired from the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1959. In 1970, Blackwood published "The Classification of Artefacts in the Pitt Rivers Museum" upon request of researchers visiting the Museum. Blackwood was still found working at the Museum long after her official retirement, up until a few days before her death in 1975.