decades after World War II. He graduated in classical philology in Belgrade in 1936 and specialized at Karl’s University in Prague (receiving his Ph.D. in 1939). Between 1939 and 1945, he was curator of archaeology in the Provincial Museum in Sarajevo, between 1945 and 1947, he was curator in the City Museum at Ptuj, and beginning in 1947, he was at Ljubljana University where he founded the Department of Archaeology and was professor of prehistoric and early Slavonic archaeology.

In 1948, Korošec was one of the initiators of the Institute of Archaeology at the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences. He founded the central national archaeological journal Arheoloshi vestnik in 1950, and in 1964, he founded the journal for Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Eneolithic archaeology, Porocilo o raziskovanju paleolita, neolita in eneolita v Sloveniji. He was also a correspondent member of the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences in Zagreb, the deutsches archäologisches institut (German Archaeological Institute) in Berlin, and the Institute for Pre- and Protohistory in Florence.

Besides academic and organizational work, his contribution to field archaeology was significant. Korošec conducted several excavations, of which the most important were the prehistoric and early Slavonic site of Ptuj, the Ljubljana marshes, and the Neolithic site of Drulovka, all in Slovenia. In the other republics of the former Yugoslavia, Korošec excavated Danilo near Sibenik and Bribir near Zadar (both in Croatia) as well as Amzabegovo in Macedonia. He collaborated on fieldwork and analyses with his colleague and wife, Paola Korošec.

Korošec introduced vere gordon childe’s concept of culture into Slovene archaeology. According to Korošec, culture could be divided into the material and spiritual. The cultural group was determined culturally, geographically, chronologically, and ethnically, providing an entity with a certain degree of common economic and social organization. In 1947, Korošec published his first large synthesis on the history of Slavs in Slovenia, Staroslovenska grobisca v severni Sloveniji. This work was opposed to Nazi archaeology, which had also sought support for German ethnogenesis in sites in Slovenia in order to justify German geopolitical appetites. Paradoxically, the conceptual framework of gustav kossinna’s Siedlungsarchaeologie (settlement archaeology), the basis of German expansionist theses, was nevertheless applied to Korošec research on early Slavonic sites. However, Korošec ’s work on the theoretical considerations and definitions of archaeology, and its relationships with other social and humanist sciences and history, set the pattern for the future development of archaeology in Slovenia. He published numerous works—13 books, 116 discussions, 106 book reviews, 20 surveys—and his synthesis An Introduction to the Material Culture of the Slavs in Early Medieval Period (1952) is still one of the cornerstones of Slovenian national archaeology.

Irena Mirnik Prezelj

References

Grafenauer, B. 1967. “J. Korošec.” Zgodovinski casopis (Ljubljana) 21: 238–246. Includes bibliography.

Klemenc, J. 1966. “In memoriam, J. Korošec.” Arheoloski vestnik (Ljubljana) 17: 3–7.

Kossinna, Gustaf

(1858–1931)

Born in East Prussia, the son of a secondary school teacher, Kossinna absorbed the German nationalist ethic prevalent in the education system of the time—the direct result of contemporary politics when Prussia was leading German unification. He attended the Universities of Gottingen, Leipzig, Berlin and Strasbourg. In Berlin Kossinna studied German philology, history and geography, but it was lectures on German and Indo-European linguistics that particularly interested him, and the problem of the location of the original Indo-German homeland (Urheimat) was to preoccupy him for his entire life. In 1881 he received a doctorate for his thesis on the linguistic subject “Ancient Upper-Frankian Written Monuments.” In 1892 he started to work as a librarian at the University of Berlin.

Kossinna’s interests in the original German homeland, and the roots of the German language and its ancient vocabulary sparked his interest in the material culture of ancient Germans.