National Archaeological Museum (Madrid)

The National Archaeological Museum (Museo Arqueológico Nacional; MAN) is a museum in Madrid, Spain. It is located on Calle de Serrano beside the Plaza de Colón, sharing its building with the National Library of Spain. The museum was founded in 1867 by a Royal Decree of Isabella II as a depository for numismatic, archaeological, ethnographical and decorative art collections of the Spanish monarchs. The establishment of the museum was predated by a previous unmaterialised proposal by the Royal Academy of History in 1830 to create a museum of antiquities. The museum was originally located in the Embajadores district of Madrid. In 1895, it moved to a building designed specifically to house it, a neoclassical design by architect Francisco Jareño, built from 1866 to 1892. In 1968, renovation and extension works considerably increased its area. The museum closed for renovation in 2008 and reopened in April 2014. Following a restructuring of the collection in the 1940s, its former pieces relative to the section of American Ethnography were transferred to the Museum of the Americas, while other pieces from abroad were destined to the National Museum of Ethnography and to the National Museum of Decorative Arts. Its current collection is based on pieces from the Iberian Peninsula, from Prehistory to Early-Modern Age. However, it also has different collections coming from outside of Spain, especially from Ancient Greece, both from the metropolitan and, above all, from Magna Graecia, and, to a lesser extent, from Ancient Egypt, in addition to "a small number of pieces" from Near East. In the forecourt is a replica of the Cave of Altamira from the 1960s. Photogrammetry was used to reproduce the famous paintings on a mould of the original cave. The replica cave is related to an exhibit at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Visitors enter the building at basement level, and pass to the prehistory section. The halls devoted to the Protohistory of the Iberian Peninsula (1st floor) exhibit pieces from a number of Pre-Roman peoples existing roughly along the 1st millennia BC, as well as from the Punic-Phoenician colonisation.