Henry Balfour

Henry Balfour FRS FRAI (11 April 1863 – 9 February 1939) was a British archaeologist, and the first curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum.

He was president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Museums Association, Folklore Society, Royal Geographical Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Henry Balfour was born in 1863 in Croydon, London, United Kingdom. He was the only son of Lewis Balfour (1833–1885), a silk broker from Croydon, and Sarah Walker Comber (1836–1916). He had two older sisters: Edith Balfour (born c. 1859) and Marian Balfour (born c. 1860).

Balfour was educated at Charterhouse and Trinity College, Oxford (matriculated 1881–graduated 1885), and took Honours Mods and later the final school of animal morphology in 1885. In 1884, the University of Oxford accepted the collection of ethnological and archaeological specimens made and arranged by General Augustus Pitt Rivers. Professor H. N. Moseley, in whose charge the creation of the Pitt Rivers Museum was placed, invited Balfour, who was one of his students, to assist in the installation of the collection in the new museum building. Moseley had recognized the keen and alert intelligence of Balfour, his love of animals, and his skill as a draughtsman.

Balfour continued to work under Moseley's supervision until Moseley's death in 1891 when the responsibility for the museum was transferred to Balfour. Balfour was appointed Curator in 1893 and continued in that position until his death. Balfour's work and his collecting grew the museum past the original nucleus of the Pitt Rivers collection. He developed a circle of colleagues from institutions around the world and drew on those relationships to encourage new acquisitions. He travelled extensively and donated a large number of accquisitions to the museum. He also gave lectures to Oxford University students who went on to excellent careers as anthropologists and colonial administrators and who also donated to the museum.

Balfour stated in his Presidential Address to the Somersetshire Archaeological and Natural History Society in 1919:

Arguing from the known to the unknown, these modern survivals of early cultures have been used, as far as possible, to complete the picture of the life and industries of Prehistoric Man. From the combined material derived from ancient and modern times series were created to show, tentatively at any rate, how the more developed types of appliances were arrived at by successive slight improvements from their simple and generalized prototypes. Incidentally these typological series serve to demonstrate the geographical distribution of particular arts, industries, and appliances, a matter which is becoming recognized as increasingly important, as affording valuable clues to the intricate problems of racial dispersal and migration routes, and as supplying evidence of the culture-contact between various peoples not necessarily related to one another.

Balfour went on to say, "In studying the development of human arts, it must not be supposed that progress was effected by a simple process of what is known as 'end-on' evolution, the successive morphological changes following one another in simple unilinear series."