The Organization of Archaeological Research

The first type of organization in which archaeology was performed on a professional or semiprofessional level was the museum. The National Museum in Prague (originally the Museum of the Kingdom of Bohemia) and the Moravian Museum in Brno, both founded in 1818, were followed by Olomouc (in northern Moravia) and other smaller museums that became centers of archaeological research, and they continued to be so during the second half of the nineteenth century. In addition to the large museums many local museums were opened in which amateur archaeologists were especially active at the end of the nineteenth and in the first half of the twentieth centuries.

The second centers of archaeological research were the universities. The Charles University in Prague, founded in 1348, has had a chair of Bohemian antiquities since 1850. Jan Erazim Vocel, a partisan of the three-age system who compiled a book on Bohemian antiquities (Starožitnosti země české, 1866), was its first professor of archaeology. In 1898 Lubor Niederle was appointed the first professor of prehistoric archaeology, and since that time the chair has been occupied permanently (except during World War II, when Czech universities were closed by the Germans). Yet though Charles University educated several professional archaeologists, most of them in the second half of the twentieth century, it never became the center of Czech archaeology. It did not perform any major excavations, and its staff was always limited to a very few persons. Nonetheless, it produced a number of outstanding professional archaeologists on a high level. The Brno University in Moravia has had a chair of prehistoric archaeology since 1933, and in many respects it has been more active archaeologically than Charles University in Prague. At present archaeology is also taught at a number of smaller universities, but none of them has a chair of archaeology.

The network of museums and universities was supplemented by the State Archaeological Institute in 1919 (with a Brno branch in 1941). Originally, the institute was a small body occupied mainly with fieldwork. It became the core of the Archaeological Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, founded in accordance with the Russian template in 1953. As a result of that move any hopes of Czechoslovakia getting an institution to take over the care of archaeological monuments and rescue excavations vanished.

The foundation of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences was a part of the program to unify the Soviet empire by building comparable structures everywhere; the goal in creating this institute was to easily control the sphere of science and humanities from one communist party center. This meant an incredible degree of centralization, with more than half of all Czech archaeologists directly attached to this institute (others were attached indirectly). The Prague Archaeological Institute had some 200 employees in 1989, and there was another but smaller institute in Brno. Museums and universities were not allowed to grow in this phase, and in the first twenty years there was no body responsible for rescue excavations (later, this responsibility was partly assumed by the Academy Institutes). All theoretical activities were supposed to be done by the academy, whose leading position in the field of science was embodied in law. Directors of the institute became the rulers of Czech archaeology.

The socialist regime fostered people of mediocre intellect in general, and most of those in archaeology were not exceptions to this rule. To achieve anything after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, one had to be a member of the Communist Party or a secret police agent. Individuals in both these categories were active in archaeology. For the most part only children of reliable party members were allowed to study “ideological” subjects, and archaeology was considered to be one of them. In view of these facts it is surprising that a fair number of talented people escaped the attention of the party and became good archaeologists. This often happened at the cost of them joining the party. After the “capitalist revolution” in 1989, several groups of archaeologists, doing mostly rescue work, separated from the Institutes of the Academy in 1993. But otherwise the situation had