The sloping roof
A meadow out of the hill — a picnic before the museum.
Nanda Sluijsmans from Den Haag, Nederland — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Jens Cederskjold from København S, Danmark — CC BY-SA 2.0 · RhinoMind — CC BY-SA 4.0 · RhinoMind — CC BY-SA 4.0
Danish peat bogs are acidic and oxygen-free — preserving skin, hair and clothing rather than decomposing them, so dozens of Iron Age bodies emerged in near-living condition. The most famous are the Tollund Man (Silkeborg museum) and the Grauballe Man here — most ritually killed, making them the most important window onto Northern European belief two thousand years before Christianity.
Sign in to write your review of this place.
No reviews yet — be the first.
Moesgaard is Northern Europe's finest archaeological museum in building and content alike: its roof a sloping grass meadow emerging from the hill (2014) that people climb to picnic, sledge in winter and lunch in summer — a museum you walk on top of before entering, overlooking Aarhus bay and the forest. Its treasure is the Grauballe Man: an Iron Age body (3rd century BC) preserved in a Danish bog with skin, hair and fingernails complete — his throat cut, most likely in a sacrificial rite, his calm face kept two thousand years one of world archaeology's most famous, displayed with reverence in its own dark hall. The Prehistoric Trail descends you through time via immersive installations (a life-size army of modelled Vikings climbing the stairs toward you) — and the Oseberg hall, the Vikings and Asian ethnography complete it. From Aarhus bus 18, half an hour through the forest.
A meadow out of the hill — a picnic before the museum.
Life-size figures climbing toward you.
Moesgård Allé 15, 8270 Højbjerg