Santorini's most famous site is ancient Akrotiri, the elegant little town destroyed sometime between 1600 and 1500 BC by the massive volcano that created the island's deep crater. The museum's star attractions are the fragments of painted frescoes from Akrotiri, along with pottery and jewelry also found there. The museum also does an excellent job of telling the complex story of the island's geological history, and displays an impressive amount of pottery from Cycladic sites that thrived as early as 3000 BC, well before Akrotiri's heyday. The long-necked bird vases (20th–18th centuries BC) are charming, especially those decorated with paintings of long-tailed swallows, ancestors of those that still can be seen darting overhead on Santorini. Keep an eye out for the fossilized olive leaves preserved in lava by the volcano; they are proof that the olive was domesticated in Greece in ancient times. To get a deeper sense of the wonderful frescoes found at Akrotiri, head either to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, or to the Santozeum (formerly known as the Thira Foundation), just a short walk from the Museum of Prehistoric Thira. When you leave the Prehistoric Thera Museum, head back into the heart of Thira and you'll find the Santozeum just past the cable cars.