Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers gave a collection of around 20,000 objects to the University of Oxford in 1884. This donation would become the founding collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Pitt Rivers' interest in collecting archaeological and ethnographic objects came out of his early professional interests in the development of firearms. Later he started to collect many other varieties of offensive and defensive weaponry and then objects other than weapons.

The founding collection still forms about a tenth of the Pitt Rivers Museum's entire collection.