Moesgard Museum of Prehistory

Moesgard  Museum is situated at Moesgard manor in Højbjerg, a suburb of Aarhus, Denmark. It is both a regional museum and a dedicated museum for archaeology and ethnography.  The main part of the museum’s collection of archaeological artefacts is Danish, even though the museum possesses a rather large amount of archaeological material known as The Ethnographical Collections from Bahrain and other countries surrounding the Gulf. The Ethnographical Collections contains almost 50.000 artefacts from all over the World. They are used both for research and exhibitions. Besides artefacts The Ethnographical Collections contains photographic material, films and sound recordings.

The museum’s exhibitions presents several unrivalled archaeological findings from Denmark’s ancient past, amongst others the Grauballe Man, the world’s best preserved bog body and the large ritual weapon caches from Illerup Adal, testifying the power struggles and the warfare of the Iron Age. Furthermore the collection contains seven local rune stones. The main exhibition will be closed on 1. October 2012 due to rearrangements of the archaeological collections in Moesgard Museums new building, located only a short distance from the old manor house. The new museum will be open to visitors in 2014.

In the surrounding area of Moesgard, an open-air museum of several reconstructions have been made, each one reflecting a part of Denmark’s past. North of the museum two houses and a stave-church from the Viking Period have been build. First is a house from the Viking Age town of Hedeby near Schleswig, Germany. It has been dated to the time around 870 AD and is interpreted as the home of a craftsman’s or trader’s family. The other house is a reconstruction of a pit-house Viking Age Aarhus, from about 900 AD. Pit-houses are small huts, dug half-way into the ground, which could be used as dwellings, workshops or storerooms.