Schuyler Jones
Schuyler Jones CBE (7 February 1930 – 17 May 2024) was an American-born anthropologist and museum curator who spent much of his career in the United Kingdom. He is best known for his fieldwork in Nuristan, Afghanistan, and for leading the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford from 1985 to 1997.
Jones was born in Wichita, Kansas. After World War II he lived in Paris as a photographer, then spent four years in Africa as a freelance photojournalist. He later lived in Greece, supporting himself by translating technical books. In 1958, after an overland trip from Greece toward India and Nepal, he said he developed a deep interest in Afghanistan.
He studied anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, earning an MA in 1965, and completed a DPhil at Oxford in 1970. His doctoral thesis, under the supervision of Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, looked at Nuristan’s Waigal Valley. After his PhD, he became Assistant Curator and University Lecturer in Ethnology at the Pitt Rivers Museum and Linacre College (1971–1985), then Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum until 1997. He later returned to the United States.
Jones served on the board of the Kansas State Historical Society from 2004, was a Council member of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1986–1989), and a Trustee of the Horniman Museum (1989–1995). He was made a CBE in 1998 for services to the Pitt Rivers Museum.
His fieldwork was wide-ranging. He traveled in North Africa, the Belgian Congo, and East Africa in the 1950s, then in Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal in 1958–1959. He conducted ten expeditions to Nuristan between 1960 and 1970, which produced his best-known work. He later visited Chinese Turkestan, Tibet and the Gobi Desert, Southern China, Xinjiang and Pakistan, Greenland, and East Africa.
Jones was a prolific photographer, and his images are kept at the Pitt Rivers Museum. His professional papers are in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. He published several books, including Under the African Sun (1956); Men of Influence in Nuristan (1974); Nuristan (1979, with Lennart Edelberg); Tibetan Nomads (1996); and A Stranger Abroad: A Memoir (2011).
He died on 17 May 2024 at the age of 94.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 16:10 (CET).