Horniman Museum and Gardens

Events at Horniman Museum and Gardens

• Archaeology

  Exhibition

  Recurring event

  The Horniman Museum's collections include a substantial amount of archaeological material, including items from all over the world. Frederick Horniman began these collections himself, and they were added to over the decades through donations and purchases from a number of sources. British prehistoric material forms a large proportion of collection, the bulk of it flint tools, some from well-known sites such as Swanscombe and Grimes Graves. There are also prehistoric objects from all over Europe and some parts of Africa. Ancient Peruvian pottery and Caribbean stone tools are also represented. The Museum has a large number of Ancient Egyptian artefacts as well as a collection of Ancient Greek and Cypriot pottery. Other material includes flint tools and weapons from North America, glass spearheads from Australia and a small collection of Romano-British objects.

   

• Book Zone

  Exhibition

  Recurring event

  Make connections to Horniman Museum and Gardens objects, exhibitions through reading in a group.

   

• Centenary Gallery: A Hundred Years of Collecting

  Exhibition

  Recurring event

  The Centenary Gallery puts on show anthropological artefacts from cultures and civilisations from every continent. The gallery focuses on the changes in perspective of collectors over the last 100 years, from amateur enthusiasts like Frederick Horniman himself, to academic anthropologists such as Alfred Cort Haddon, the Museum's first advisory curator. Items collected by recent anthropology curators from places such as Nigeria, the American Southwest and Nepal show how collecting has become a much more collaborative enterprise.

   

• Collections: African

  Exhibition

  Recurring event

  The African collections, an estimated 22,000 objects, represent 28 per cent of the total ethnography collection. The geographical range of the collection is wide, covering the whole of the continent, with virtually every modern African state represented, stretching from the northern deserts to the Cape of Good Hope and from the Guinea Coast to the Horn of Africa. The variety of material is considerable and encompasses aspects of many different lifestyles, from hunter-gathering and farming to town and city life. From the 1950's, development of the collection focused on representing the material culture of specific African peoples. Significant museum holdings include systematic collections from the Sua of Zaire, the Hadza of Tanzania, the San of Botswana, the Tuareg of Algeria, the Samburu of Kenya and the people of the Cross-River area of Nigeria.