Edward Evans-Pritchard Archive Collection (Pitt Rivers Museum)

The Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973) collection is a collection of music archives housed at Pitt Rivers Museum. It features of 86 wax cylinder recordings captured during Evans-Pritchard visit in Zandeland in South Sudan between 1928 and 1930. Evans-Pritchard's also published anthropological texts on the Zande and Nuer people of South Sudan in the 1930s. He was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford from 1947 until his retirement in 1970.

The collection is also made up of European children's songs to Bayaka women's songs of the Central African Republic. The museum’s website houses several thousand hours of archival sounds. It includes information about other field collectors and their related collections.

Recordings in this collection are mostly spoken word but also include music. The recording quality may be very poor throughout, but nonetheless the collection offers a glimpse into the fieldwork of one of the most well-known anthropologists of the 20th Century. His wax cylinders consist of various Zande songs, dances and spoken word recordings. They include men and women singing, dance songs, dances with percussion and other instruments relevant to Zande song performances. These songs are fighting songs, circumcision songs and songs to neutralize sorcery.
The wax cylinders held at the Pitt Rivers Museum are ‘Galvano’ copies made from originals deposited at the Berlin Phonogram-Archiv. Evans-Pritchard is also known to have sent some recordings to Professor Erich von Hornbostel now also held at the Berlin Phonogramm-Archive.

His archive of field photographs and artefact collections are all available online as part of the Pitt Rivers Museum's southern Sudan project.

The museum is available to the public, scholars and other audiences.