Archäologische Staatssammlung — Attraction in Munich

9 years i waited to visit this museum, waiting for it to reopen.

So, was it worth the wait? What is Munich''s newly refurbished archaeological Museum like?

Firstly the positives, and there are a lot of positives, a lot of things to like. Everything is beautifully displayed, lovely new cases with excellent lighting (although the lighting needs some adjustment to make it a bit more directional as there's a lot of glare on glass in some areas. Some of the displays are very imaginatively done, particularly the area where everything is underneath glass tiles on the floor that you can walk over. Plenty of buttons to push for the easily distracted and a couple of very effective interactive bits, particularly the 5 glass phials with pungent contents..the myrrh smelt wonderful but I'd suggest moving the second flask to the end because the Nard utterly destroyed my ability to smell the other three.

And space...lots of space....lots of space with nothing in it.

And there's the biggest problem with this new, shiny, modern museum...it's half empty. On my only previous visit nine years ago I was only able to visit the Roman gallery and that was absolutely rammed with stuff. Still in nice, shiny cases, still well lit, but with all the space fully devoted to doing what a museum should be doing ...showing off what if has.

This one...not so much. It suffers in the same way that the revised early mediaeval gallery at the British museum suffers..too much dead space

The other major problem...pretty much no visible information about the exhibits. Every case has a QR code which will take you to a very informative page on an excellent website..but very, very little in the galleries themselves, at least in the historical epoch galleries (the thematic galleries did have signage). Want to know where that glass beaker is from? Got to scan the QR code, navigate to the page for the case, then drill down to find out specific information about the object you're interested in. It's clever, clearly took a lot to set up and will be very engaging for younger visitors (who no doubt in the future will just be able to scan the codes with their optical implants and have all of the information dumped directly into their cerebral cortex)...but a bit of labelling would be nice. It will make captioning the hundreds of photos that I took today a much more difficult and arduous task...so I may not bother.

Anyway, enough of that. It is a good Museum, well worth visiting and worth waiting for...although maybe not for...

Reopened in April 2024, museum building is redesigned & became a cities modern architecture highlight Rather small, but offering comprehensive exibits covering stone Age to Roman & early Middle Ages. A hall on Roman Empire footprint & artifacts in Bavaria is especially interesting. Most of descriptions are in German, one can scan a QR code to read expanded & english versions, but personally I am rather not a fan of tying myself to the smartphone when in museum. If possible, stick to Sundays as you pay 1 EUR for entrance instead of regular 7. Equally worth visiting is a 2nd floor terrace, where you can get a relaxed drink at Solâ bar while looking at the greenery of Englischer Garten & teams running...

Great museum BUT only for german speakers. Engaging exibitions in every room but if you are non-german speaking there is 0 information on the objects, I imagine mostly for "design reasons" so the displays look minimalistic (non functional design). It is time consuming and labour intensive to use the web app which covers a part of the exhibit leaving out a lot of the overall narration so I ended up using google lense, again annoying. Make sure to load the web app at the entrance as there is no 5G reception or wifi in the museum iteslf. Overall a wasted opportunity to make an amazing exhibition accesible for international guests, I assume this hits them in the...