Symonds Street Cemetery Walk: New Zealand Archaeology Week

Please note registration is required. Please book via the event organizers event page.

Event information:
University of Auckland biological anthropologist, Dr Heather Battles, leads this free walking tour of Symonds Street Cemetery hosted by Auckland Archaeological Society.

Symonds Street is a first-generation urban settler cemetery in operation mainly from 1842 to 1886. It originally operated as five separate cemeteries until it was formally closed in 1909 and turned over to Auckland Council as a public park.

This tour will review some of the history of the Cemetery and struggles with preservation and maintenance, especially the impact of the motorway works in the 1960s. We will also discuss the Cemetery as a site of community service learning, with the example of a project undertaken in 2016 by students enrolled in an Anthropological Demography course, which involved analysis of demographic data transcribed from the surviving headstones and from the online burial database.

Please note that the cemetery is built on a slope and has some stairs. It may be slippery when wet.

Registration required: Places are limited.
Please register using our Google Form: https://forms.gle/2wv2rvcYjb5v5me29
Registration provides event information, the meeting point, what to bring, and any health and safety guidelines. As places are limited, if you know of other people who are interested, please invite them to register.

Event organiser: Auckland Archaeological Society.

Email: aklarchsoc@gmail.com