South African Museum
| Suid-Afrikaanse Museum | |
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| Established | 1825 |
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| Location | Company's Garden |
| Type | Zoology, palaeontology, archaeology |
| Accreditation | Iziko museum |
| Public transit access | Bus: MyCiTi 101, 106, 107 |
| Website | www |
The Iziko South African Museum is a South African national museum located in Cape Town a city that is a capital of South Africa and has the famous prisoner site of Robben Island. The museum was founded in 1825, the first in the country. It has been on its present site in the Company's Garden since 1897. The museum houses important African zoology, palaeontology and archaeology collections.Iziko is a Xhosa word meaning "hearth".
The South African Museum was founded by Lord Charles Somerset in 1825 as a general museum comprising natural history and material culture from local and other groups further afield. In time, it developed greater systematic organisation and classification similar to the evolutionary models that were prominent in European and American museums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The focus on natural history encouraged the notion that very little divided the animal world from the human subjects who were documented.
This continued until the 1990s with the reservation of cultural history museums for the display of settler histories and the relegation of material culture from other cultures to natural history and anthropology museums. "Bushmen", referring collectively to San and Khoi indigenous groups, were considered lowest on the evolutionary timescale and as living remnants of "civilised" man's prehistory, akin to the highest form of ape. As such, they became the subject of intensive research, particularly from 1906 onwards under the directorship of Louis Péringuey. Subsequent research on Bushmen was informed by the rise of physical anthropology, a discipline in the European scientific community that drew direct correlation between physical type and evolutionary status and therefore intellectual, cultural and social status, as discussed in a 1988 article by Annie Coombes.
Between 1907 and 1924 Péringuey initiated a casting project, carried out by museum modeller James Drury, in which sixty-eight body casts of "pure Bushmen specimens" were taken in a process that was both humiliating and painful for the participants. The title of Drury's book, Bushman, whale and dinosaur, detailing his 40-year affiliation with the South African Museum, gives some indication of the status these specimens were given.
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