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Archaeology Museum

Traces of Life

[Translate to English:] Ansicht Dauerausstellung Archäologiemuseum Schloss Eggenberg [Translate to English:] Ansicht Dauerausstellung Archäologiemuseum Schloss Eggenberg

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Location

Archaeology Museum, Schloss Eggenberg

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Please note our winter closing times!

Opening hours

About the exhibition

The Archaeology Museum displays more than 1,200 objects which, as "traces of life", form the starting points for questions that have moved people for thousands of years. Highlights of the permanent exhibition include world-class objects from the Hallstatt period, such as the cult chariot from Strettweg or the mask from Kleinklein, as well as the most valuable Roman find from Styria, the silver cup from Grünau.

Some questions remain unanswered

We wanted to create a museum that gets under the skin and appeals to everyone who is interested in people, their living environments, their expressions of religiosity and the social conditions under which they lived.

The Archaeology Museum also aims to convey how limited and fragmentary our knowledge of the past often is, so that some questions must remain unanswered. The exhibits, which are widely dispersed in time and space, are therefore understood less in their contextualised historical dimension than as archetypal constants of basic human needs.

We invite you to discuss the objects in the exhibition as solutions to questions about being human. Interviews conducted with well-known Austrians are intended to provide food for thought.

[Translate to English:] Ansicht Dauerausstellung Archäologiemuseum Schloss Eggenberg

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Object information reduced to facts is intended to create a clear separation between hidden fiction and facts.

The light wells offer the opportunity to offer educational programmes specially tailored to children and young people and to show smaller thematic units as "work in progress" while the scientific work is still in progress.

The Archaeology Museum sees itself as a place of constant communication, not only between museum visitors and scientists, but also between the visitors themselves.

Since September 2009, 1,221 archaeological objects have been on display in a new 600 m² building designed by BWM Architects in the park of Schloss Eggenberg. The building directly adjoins the multi-award-winning Lapidarium by PURPUR.architektur and adopts its design language.

The Lapidarium

The Roman reliefs and inscriptions held by the Universalmuseum Joanneum is one of the largest and most important collections in Austria and the entire Eastern Alps region.

The Lapidarium in the Palace gardens at Eggenberg contains three mosaic floors and 96 selected Roman stone artefacts from the province of Styria and part of Slovenia (formerly Lower Styria). Most of the stones belonged to funerary monuments: many represent portraits of Roman individuals; inscriptions and details of the representation such as clothing, attributes or figures of servants provide a rich testimony of ancient lives, professions and personal wealth. Mythological reliefs recall undying divine love and dedicatory altars commemorate the keeping of vows.

[Translate to English:] Ansicht Dauerausstellung Archäologiemuseum Schloss Eggenberg

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