Lieutenant General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers FRS FSA FRAI (14 April 1827 – 4 May 1900) was an English officer in the British Army, ethnologist, and archaeologist.

In 1880, Lane Fox inherited the estates of his cousin, Horace Pitt-Rivers, 6th Baron Rivers and with it the remainder of the Richard Rigby fortune.

The Pitt Rivers Museum suggests that some of the founding collection, particularly some Indian items, may have come from John Constantine Stanley (1837–1878), younger brother of Alice.

Augustus' descendants include his grandson, anthropologist, eugenicist, and anti-Semite George Pitt-Rivers, who was interned in 1940 under Defence Regulation 18B.

He was educated at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, for six months at the age of fourteen and was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards on 16 May 1845 as an ensign.

[14] In the course of a thirty-two-year military career, albeit much interrupted by leave, he only once saw major front line action, at the Battle of Alma in 1854.

The remainder of his service career revolved around musketry instruction and in 1858 he published a paper On the improvement of the rifle as a weapon for general use.

[19] The then brevet-major Lane Fox was appointed a member of the Fifth Class of the Order of the Medjidie in 1858 for "distinguished services before the enemy during the [Crimean War]".

Pitt Rivers' interests in archaeology and ethnology began in the 1850s, during postings overseas, and he became a noted scientist while he was a serving military officer.

His interest began with the evolution of the rifle, which extended to other weapons and tools, and he became a collector of artifacts illustrating the development of human invention.

[24] The same year, he visited an archaeological excavation being carried out in the Yorkshire Wolds by Canon William Greenwell, librarian of Durham Cathedral and an established archaeologist, to whom he may have been introduced by mutual friends George Rolleston or Albert Way.

[28] The Pitt Rivers Museum curates more than half a million ethnographic and archaeological artifacts, photographic and manuscript collections from all parts of the world.

Pitt Rivers and other early archaeologists such as William Stukeley who first investigated the prehistory of Wiltshire, Cranborne Chase, Avebury and Stonehenge, are celebrated in the gallery.

This focus on everyday objects as the key to understanding the past broke decisively with earlier archaeological practice, which verged on treasure hunting.