Symonds Street Cemetery walking tour with Dr Heather Battles Event as iCalendar

About the tour

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

Symonds Street Cemetery 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 its struggles with preservation and maintenance, looking especially at 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.

Places are limited, so please register early using our Google form. 

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.

Also see our Facebook event and New Zealand Archaeology Week listing for more information.