Halfway up the Stairs.

The Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford is an astonishing treasure house. I've never yet gone there and not found another intriguing object, often with an equally fascinating back-story.

Halfway up one of the staircases there is a display cabinet, the Archive Case, that is changed quite regularly, and I always make a point of stopping off to see what's there. At the moment there are pictures and letters shedding light on one of the museum's bigger artefacts, the huge Haida Totem Pole - right in the middle of the picture.

The pole started life in Masset on what was called Queen Charlotte Island in British Columbia in Western Canada. It was raised in the 19th Century to mark the adoption of a daughter by the chief of the Haida community.

The process of acquiring the totem pole is told via a series of photographs and letters. E B Taylor, at the time Keeper of the University Museum, commissioned the Hudson's Bay Company to acquire the pole (which they got for a very reasonable price, the bottom apparently having dropped out of the totem pole market in the last few years of the 19th Century), and to arrange shipping.

The HBC representative initially proposed cutting the pole into three parts and shipping it via the Canadian west coast. Later it transpired that it didn't cost much more to ship by Canadian Pacific Railroad to the east coast for shipping, this was also significantly quicker. Shipping in one piece was clearly considered as too big a leap, but the pole was eventually cut into just two pieces before being crated for its journey to the UK. There is more about the story on the Pitt-Rivers website.

And if you're visiting the Pitt-Rivers over the summer, do also make sure you track down the exhibition of modern photography from Senegal.

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