1989 during the process of the disintegration of the Soviet empire, and it is now striving to revitalize contacts with western democracies that were severed in 1938. The eastern part of Czechoslovakia, Slovakia, chose independence in 1992, so what remained is the Czech Republic. From the geographic point of view and also historically, the Czech Republic has been divided into two parts: the west is called Bohemia, the east, Moravia.

The archaeological record of both Bohemia and Moravia began in the early Paleolithic period. It was richly structured into settlement sites, cemeteries (both “flat” and those with surviving barrows), hoards, fortifications, ritual monuments, and so forth. The number of sites runs to the thousands, and most of them are polycultural. Settlement sites, whose mutual distance is from 1 to 3 kilometers in many instances, mostly consist of underground features filled with cultural deposits full of shards (since the Neolithic period), animal bones, and other finds, but there are few superimposed layers. “Pagan” graves preceding the ninth century a.d. usually contain grave goods (pottery, stone, bronze, and/or iron artifacts). In consequence of the rich artifactual record, most of the post-Mesolithic sites can be classified with the accuracy of plus or minus 100 years. All these circumstances create very good conditions for detailed archaeological research.

The Beginnings of Archaeological Interest

The Czech chronicler Kosmas, who died in a.d. 1125, mentioned a barrow near Prague where a legendary Czech military leader of the ninth century should have been buried. This is an early example of the interpretation of an archaeological monument. Similarly, Václav Hájek of Libočany, writing in 1541, believed that the Marcomanian king Marobuduus (first century a.d.) had his seat at Závist near Prague, a place that is now known as a late–la tène period oppidum (fortified town). His interpretation was nearly correct from the chronological point of view, which may have been a matter of chance, but it should be kept in mind that Hájek was unusually good at inventing details when historical evidence failed him; apparently he had a good model of the past.

The first exact field observation was that of Karel Škréta, a painter who in 1668 made a drawing of the siege of Libice, an early medieval stronghold in Bohemia. Although he placed the historically attested battle of the tenth century into the eastern part of the site (with a gothic church, etc.), he also faithfully recorded the empty western part, consisting of bare fields surrounded by a simple rampart. One flat place in the fields has been described by Škréta as “ruins”; this is exactly where excavations of the 1950s unearthed the ground plan of a tenth-century church lying in the center of the original stronghold. All this is not very surprising to those who know that peasants of the late-medieval period (and much earlier times) correctly identified long-deserted earthworks as ancient forts and barrows as ancient graves. Many Iron Age hill-forts carry the name Hradiště, which means hill-fort in Czech; this also applies to cases where the ramparts are barely visible.

The first recorded collection containing archaeological objects was that of the Bohemian King Rudolph II, who was also a Roman emperor. It was kept in the royal palace in Prague and enriched by the king himself by means of excavations of a Bronze Age cemetery in Silesia, which in Rudolf’s time belonged to the Kingdom of Bohemia. The excavation took place in 1577, and Rudolph unearthed one of the vessels with his own royal hands.

The Romantic Period

As in most European countries, archaeological activities in Bohemia and Moravia greatly increased in the romantic period from the end of the eighteenth century onward. The main idea was the belief that prehistory as recovered by archaeology was a backward projection of history, with the same “nations” and the same habits as recorded in the earliest written documents. There was no knowledge of the great antiquity of the human race; in fact, very few people ever considered the question of what preceded the Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic “nations” in central Europe. Therefore, the romantic query did not demand any systematic handling of the archaeological finds, which were simply believed to be illustrations of ancient history.