The Hallstatt Museum, on the main square, houses an unrivalled collection of finds from the prehistoric salt mines and from the great Iron Age cemetery on the Salzberg. The cemetery — excavated from the 1840s onwards — yielded over 1,500 graves with such a distinctive mix of swords, bronze vessels, amber, and ivory that archaeologists named an entire era of European prehistory after the village: the Hallstatt culture, roughly 800 to 450 BCE.
The displays are well lit and intelligently signed in English, German, and several Asian languages. Highlights include the prehistoric leather rucksacks preserved in salt, a reconstructed Bronze Age wooden staircase from the mine, and a section on the dramatic 18th-century lawsuit by which the people of Hallstatt won the right to bury their dead in the village despite the cemetery being on borderland of the salt monopoly. Allow an hour and a half.