Antalya Archaeological Museum

From Aspendos we drove straight in to Antalya, a sprawling city of a million, and found our way to our main goal, its archaeological museum. The museum was one of the best we have seen, for a variety of reasons, and so I will give it two posts.

The Lycian sarcophogus is their trademark, but there is much more

It has a beautiful setting just west of the sehir merkezi and a beautiful campus

Bronze age burial practice around here (for some): in a big amphora jar



I always tell her to stand next to something "for scale," then 
try to think of some outrageous caption...



Perfume or oil jar, 5th century BCE

Baby bottle, for feeding (seriously)

Roman legionnaire's canteen



One of the things we really liked was an entire section--a big room--devoted to 
the various major digs and the archaeologists behind them

Another was the overall educational emphasis of the place; I think I learned more 
at this museum--not merely about the collection, but about back-story practices and

technologies (where marble comes from, how it is mined, how it is moved, various 
types of sculpture, tools used by ancient sculptors, and so on)--than in any other I 
have seen; period; here's an entire large room devoted to pottery and especially the 
potter's wheel; and not dumbed-down to 9 year-olds, either

One of the great paleolithic finds in the world is Karain Cave, not far from 
Antalya--continuously inhabited for 25,000 years, first by neandethals, then 
homo sapiens, everything from low paleolithic to age of metals; the good 
stuff is in the museum here

Ditto



Cute little solid gold cupid earring; its mate

is still out there in the ground somewhere...

4th century BCE relief