Anthropological Collection

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A large collection of Zulu material culture including beadwork, woodcarvings, ceramics, and weaponry. The beadwork collection is rated as one of the most comprehensive and well-researched in South Africa. Also important is a small but valuable collection of nineteenth-century items associated with Zulu royalty: ceramic vessels and four strings of wooden beads, iziqu, apparently awarded for valour in battle. A well-documented assemblage of headrests, milk pails and meat platters from Msinga in KwaZulu-Natal makes up the Jolles Collection, gathered by museum research associate Professor Frank Jolles in the 1990s

A well-documented collection of Southern Sotho material culture, including an assemblage of 30 rare Southern Sotho ceramic pieces dating to the early 1900s.

West African material culture, including a set of Ashanti gold weights from Ghana, and woodcarvings such as masks.

African textile collection from beyond the provincial borders.

Colonial Victoriana of KwaZulu-Natal, which formed the basis of the exhibits portraying aspects of life in Victorian Pietermaritzburg.

Items and weaponry relating to the Anglo-Zulu War.

An initiative of Graham Dominy, the Amandla Collection includes material specifically associated with the anti-apartheid struggle and its consequences (banners, T-shirts, caps, buttons, and documents). Much of it comes from the Midlands: items associated with Pietermaritzburg's Seven Days War in March 1990 and township conflict on the Witwatersrand make the Museum's collection of war memorabilia of the 1800s and 1900s more comprehensive.

Video recording and film of "living culture" (rituals, dances, oral data etc).

Archaeological Collection

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A huge Early Stone Age collection gathered mainly by the late Professor Oliver Davies. He published information on this material in a range of archaeological journals, including the Annals of the Natal Museum.

Middle Stone Age material consisting mostly of surface artefacts, but with the notable exception of the Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter assemblage recovered by Jonathan Kaplan and published in the Natal Museum Journal of Humanities.

A Later Stone Age collection generated principally from excavations, especially those by Aron Mazel in the Thukela Basin (see papers in the Natal Museum journals). Through its collection and research, the Natal Museum led southern African archaeology towards a more socially-nuanced understanding of the past. The Later Stone Age collection also includes painted Bushman art removed from Bamboo Mountain, The Meads and other Drakensberg rock art sites.

The Bushman Rock Art archive, which is the largest museum-based rock art archive in the country. The department houses a collection of over 370 copies of Bushman art, including many made by Patricia Vinnicombe - some of which she published in her book "People of the Eland". Also in this collection are some of the earliest surviving copies of paintings in the Natal Drakensberg, made by Mark and Graham Hutchinson, in the 1880s. The archive also contains data from over 700 sites with around 30 000 photographic and copied images, many from painting sites in the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg World Heritage Site. The entire rock art archive is currently (2006/7) being digitised by the South African Rock Art Digital Archive (SARADA), based at the University of the Witwatersrand.

An Early Iron Age collection - through its collection and research in this field, the Natal Museum has made the greatest single contribution world-wide to knowledge of precolonial African farmers. The collection includes excavated material and data from six key sites, the analysis of which yielded numerous popular and academic publications (see the Natal Museum journals).

The Late Iron Age collection includes material derived from excavations, examples of Iron Age rock engravings and photographs, and copies of rock engravings. Tim Maggs has published much of this data in the Natal Museum journals.

Sixteenth-century Portuguese shipwreck material, which specifically includes material from the São João (1552, Port Edward), the São Bento (1554, Msikaba river mouth) and the Santiago (1585, Bassas da India, Mozambique Channel). Details on the shipwrecks appear in the Annals of the Natal Museum and elsewhere.

We are currently establishing Southern Africa's first database of replicated and ancient use traces, including residues, microwear and macro-fractures - for the interpretation of precolonial material culture.

A limited collection of Roman and classical artefacts.

Other Arthropoda Collection

The KwaZulu-Natal Museum has a long history of arachnology research, and significant collections were built up by previous researchers. Currently we have no active researchers using these collections within the museum, but they still form an important resource for the international research community. In addition to the arachnology collection, smaller collections of myriapods, crustacea and onychophora

Spiders (6000 specimens) and scorpions form the largest part of the arachnology collections (2500); but opilionids (1300), pseudoscorpions (500), ticks and mites (1400), and solifugids (600) are also well represented. Terrestrial isopods (200) and amphipods (1500) are curated along with the arachnids. Much of this material is from KwaZulu-Natal, and was collected by Dr R. F. Lawrence who was based at the Natal Museum for more than 20 years. The collection includes more than 1000 type specimens.

The myriapod collection includes largest collection of identified millipedes (2000 lots) in Southern Africa, and includes over 200 type specimens. A substantial collection of centipedes (800) is also included and the onychophora collection (100) is the most important reference collection for eastern South Africa.