Museu d'Arqueologia de Catalunya

The Museu d'Arqueologia de Catalunya (MAC), housed in the Palau de les Arts Gràfiques on the slopes of Montjuïc in Barcelona, is the principal archaeological museum of the Catalan government and the custodian of the most comprehensive collection of material culture from the prehistoric, Iberian, Greek, Roman, and Visigothic periods in Catalonia. The building was designed by Raimon Duran i Reynals for the 1929 International Exhibition and retains its neoclassical colonnaded facade, providing an expansive setting for one of the largest archaeological collections in the Iberian Peninsula. The permanent collection unfolds chronologically across two floors. The sequence begins with Palaeolithic finds from Catalan cave sites and progresses through the Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age of the eastern Iberian Peninsula. A substantial Iberian section documents the culture of the pre-Roman peoples of Catalonia, centred on excavations at Ullastret — the largest known Iberian settlement in Catalonia, occupied from the 6th to the 1st century BCE — with limestone architectural reliefs, ceramic vessels, iron weapons, and female votive figurines among the section's most distinctive holdings. The Greek section draws heavily on excavations at Empúries (Emporion), the Phocaean trading colony on the Costa Brava, and includes Attic ceramics, votive bronzes, and imported statuary of the 6th through 2nd centuries BCE, illustrating the commercial relationships between the Greek colony and the indigenous Iberian world. The Roman galleries cover Catalonia from the arrival of Scipio in 218 BCE through the late Empire, with mosaics, portrait sculpture, funerary monuments, and domestic objects from Barcino, Tarraco, and Iluro (Mataró). A final section addresses the Visigothic and early medieval period (5th through 7th centuries CE) through grave goods, metalwork including fibulae and belt fittings, and architectural sculpture from Catalan church sites — a period rarely represented with this depth in Spanish public collections. The MAC also administers the Empúries excavations at L'Escala and the archaeological park at Ullastret.