Collecting the Past

Time:

During normal opening hours

Price:

Free entry for children and young people aged 21 and under, and NE28 residents | Adult and concession charges apply

During the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, many local museums were set up with the intention of educating and entertaining the public.  

This was a time of no internet, no mobiles, no television and no cheap foreign holidays. Illustrations in books were few and far between and colour images even rarer. It was much harder to find out about the world than it is now, when we can immediately pull up images on our phone, or can afford to travel to see objects in their places of origin.  

Many museums had little or no money to buy artefacts, and relied on donations to fill their cases. The donations reflected the interests of the donors, and the museums could easily hold a mix of paintings, stuffed animals, geological specimens, ethnographic and archaeological objects collected from all around the world.  

Changes in society over the last 150 years mean that most local museums nowadays tell the story of their own local area, but their stores still contain objects from elsewhere from the time when they were telling a much wider story.  

This exhibition looks at some of the archaeological material from outside Britain that ended up in four of the local museums of Tyne and Wear. 

Image: Late Antique textile from Egypt depicting a hare eating fruit