Squee! Museo arqueológico

1 Oct 2011

Alicante is fortunate to have a really spectacular archeological museum within the city limits. Ever since I heard about the museum I've been dying to go--especially since the museum currently has an exhibit from the Hermitage in Russia. This exhibit will leave Alicante on October 16th so I wanted to be sure to go to the museum before it was too late to see it!

Before I go into too much detail about the museum, I want to warn you that I completely nerded out at the museum. It was really an amazing museum and I was fascinated to see how these artifacts relate to what I already know about archeology in Greece. While in college, I took a course on the archeology of Greece which examined Greece from the time that there were people to the time of Homer. We covered the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Minoans, and the Mycenaeans. In particular, I studied the pottery found in Greece and how this pottery developed and changed over time. So part of my enjoyment in the museum was the how what I saw in the museum related to what I learned in my archeology class.

The museum only costs 3 euros to enter (1.50 euro if you have a student ID or you're a senior citizen)! The musuem itself has two parts: the permanent collection with artifacts from the area of Alicante and a visiting collection--which happens to be from Russia.

The permanent collection has a variety of galleries--dating from different periods. The first gallery has prehistoric artifacts from the first people to inhabit the area of Alicante through the Neolithic period. These people were hunter-gathers and so you can see the progression in their ability to make arrowheads and other weapons. The next gallery focused on Iberian culture and was probably one of my favorites. The term "Iberian culture" is mostly used to refer to the tribes of people who lived throughout the Iberian peninsula prior to the Roman conquest. The Iberians had come into contact with the Phoneticians and Greeks by the 6th century BC, and I could see evidence of this contact in the pottery. Not only were there pots that had been imported from Greece but there were also pots were I could see that the Iberians had tried to imitate the designs and construction of different ceramics.

The third gallery (another of my favorites!) contained findings from the Roman ruins of Lucentum in Alicante. In fact, the Roman ruins are right near the school were I work! This gallery had a lot of remnants of Roman buildings. However, the best part about this gallery was that it had some Roman mosaics! I absolutely love Roman mosaics--which I saw in Spain for the first time two years ago at the ruin of Itálica. I really excited to get the chance to visit more Roman ruins here in Alicante. I think we're planning to go to them next weekend so look for a post on that!

Next, we wandered through the gallery about the Middle Ages. This gallery focused on the tension between Muslims and Christians during this period. Spain was ruled by the Arabs off and on from 700 to 1492. The Christian reconquest began in 1085 with the conquest of Toledo. However, it was not until 1492 with the Spanish Inquisition that Muslims were officially expelled from Spain, and Jews were forced to convert to Catholicism. This conflict between Christians and Muslims has created some of the most beautiful architecture in Spain. Whenever one group conquered a city, they would take the church/mosque and turn it into their own house of worship changing the building to better reflect their beliefs. As a result, there are some amazing churches/mosques that contain elements of both religions.

The final gallery that is part of the permanent collection has modern artifacts. This gallery was a little less interesting to me--mostly because it had such a random assortment of artifacts because it covers such a large period of time.

Once we finished with the permanent collection, we moved on to the Hermitage exhibit from Russia. Like the exhibit, I felt like I had enough of a historical background to feel really excited about some of the findings. While in high school, I took a Russian history class--which meant that I recognized some of the places that the artifacts came from and what was going on in those places at the time.

Unfortunately, as we entered the exhibit, we misunderstood the guide and went through the exhibit backwards. I won't go into nearly as much detail about this exhibit as I did the other, but I will say that it was worth the visit! It was interesting to compare the motifs that were popular in Russia versus those in Greece or here in Alicante. In Alicante and Greece, the bull plays an important role in art and ritual. However, in the Russian artifacts, I noticed that depictions of elk were far more common--which is really interesting.