The first home of the museum, in 1922, was the Alâeddin Mosque. From 1937 to 1972, it lived inside the Yivli Minare Mosque, the Fluted Minaret Mosque whose tower is still one of the city's landmarks. The current building, in the Muratpaşa district near the sea, opened in 1972 and was reorganized in the mid-1980s after a thorough restoration. It now offers thirteen exhibition halls, an open-air gallery, laboratories, conservation workshops, and a children's section that was the first of its kind in Turkey. The museum covers 7,000 square meters with around 5,000 works on view; another 25,000 to 30,000 artifacts sit in storage. In 1988, the European Council recognized the museum with its Special Prize, the only Turkish museum at that time to receive the award.

Most of the museum's marble heart comes from one nearby site. Perge, a wealthy Pamphylian city about 18 kilometers east of Antalya, has yielded an extraordinary run of Roman-era sculptures, and many of them now stand in the Hall of Imperial Statues. At the center of the room is Plancia Magna, a noblewoman who funded much of Perge's golden age in the early second century AD and who was honored with statues across the city she helped build. Around her stand the emperors Hadrian, Trajan, Septimius Severus and his wife Julia Domna, the co-emperor Lucius Verus, and Caracalla. The mythological Statuary Hall next door holds the gods Perge worshipped: Minerva, Zeus, Artemis, Aphrodite, Asclepius, Hermes, Hecate, and a striking Marsyas mid-flay. A dancing woman from the second century AD remains one of the museum's most photographed pieces.

The Sarcophagus Hall holds Roman tombs from Pamphylia and Sidemara, including a Heracles sarcophagus carved with the Twelve Labors and a Dionysus sarcophagus in the Attic style. Each face was a small theater, telling the story the deceased's family wanted remembered. The Hall of Church Artefacts displays wooden church illuminations depicting the life of Christ, along with reliquary objects from Saint Nicholas of Myra, the fourth-century bishop whose generosity to children launched a thousand Christmas legends. The reliquary box on display contains bones identified as his. Nicholas served the Lycian coast, just east of Antalya, and his presence in this museum is a quiet reminder that the saint of red-suited mythology was first a real man who lived along this shoreline. The mosaic hall holds Byzantine floor mosaics from Xanthos and other Lycian sites, and the Hall of Coins traces the region's currency from Hellenistic strikes through Ottoman issues.

The Pre-History Hall reaches back further than any of the imperial portraits. Antalya sits near the Karain Cave, a single limestone chamber that humans occupied continuously from the Paleolithic through the Roman age, one of the longest unbroken records of human habitation anywhere in Europe or western Asia. Animal fossils, kitchen utensils, stone tools, and the bones of the people who used them are arranged in chronological order, so a visitor walking through the room moves backward from the Roman empire to the Bronze Age to the first humans who shaped flint with deliberate hands. The Proto-History Hall continues the journey with finds from Hacılar and Semahöyük: Neolithic and Chalcolithic pottery, early Bronze Age figurines, the small daily objects of villages that existed five thousand years before any of the temples upstairs were built.