The Bardo Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography is the principal Algerian national museum of pre-Islamic and ethnographic material, set in a late-nineteenth-century neo-Moorish villa in the El Biar district of Algiers. The museum was established in 1928 in the colonial period and reorganised after Algerian independence in 1962 as the Musée National du Bardo, with subsequent extensions to the building and to the collection across the 1960s and 1970s.
The collection is divided into two principal sections. The prehistoric collection covers the long Saharan and Atlas-region prehistory from the Acheulean through the Aterian, Capsian, and Neolithic periods, with substantial holdings of stone tools, ceramics, rock-art tracings, and skeletal material from sites across the Algerian Sahara and Tell. The Tin Hinan funerary deposit recovered from Abalessa in 1925–1927 — the cedar-and-leather bed, the gold and silver jewellery, the imported Mediterranean glass beads, and the partial skeleton attributed to the legendary Kel Ahaggar ancestress — is held in the Bardo's principal pre-historic gallery.
The ethnographic section presents the principal regional traditions of Algerian Berber and broader Maghrebi material culture: Kabyle and Chaoui jewellery and textiles, Mozabite and Touareg material from the Saharan zones, the Aurès rural-architectural register, and the comparative regional crafts. The collection has been substantially expanded since independence with material from systematic ethnographic-fieldwork programmes across the post-1962 period.
The museum has been the subject of continuing discussion in the Kel Ahaggar political and cultural community over the appropriate location of the Tin Hinan material — between the Bardo at Algiers and a possible repatriation to the Hoggar — with the discussion intensifying across the 2010s and 2020s. The Bardo remains the principal Algerian national repository of prehistoric and ethnographic Berber-period material.