Jānis Graudonis (1913– ) is a member of the Academy of Sciences of Latvia. He studied at the State University in Rīga and was an assistant at the Institute of the History of Latvia from 1947 to 1948. When the Institute was repressed by Soviet political bodies, Graudonis returned to the Institute of History in 1958. Specializing in the Bronze and Early Iron Ages and the Late Middle Ages, Graudonis led large-scale excavations in the flooded zones of the Pļaviņas and Rīga hydro-stations along the middle flow of the Daugava River. He excavated at the Turaida brick castle, built and occupied between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, for nearly twenty-five years, from 1978 to 1999. Graudonis was chairman of the second conference of the Association of European Archaeologists in Rīga in 1996.

Ādolfs Karnups (1904–1973), an archaeologist and ethnologist, studied at the State University in Rīga, then was head of Department of Ethnography at the State Museum of the History of Latvia until 1946. Karnups specialized in the archaeology of the Middle Ages. He led large-scale excavations at the Talsi hillfort from 1936 to 1937. Arrested after World War II by Soviet repressive bodies, Karnups was at first sentenced to a death but afterwards was deported to Siberia, where he remained until 1955. He was the head of the Department of Prehistory at the Museum of History of Medicine in Rīga from 1955 to 1973. His specialty during the post-Siberian period was the history of the folk medicine of the early medieval period.

Ēvalds Mugurēvičs (1931– ) studied at the State University in Rīga and was the head of the Department of Archaeology at the Institute of the History of Latvia from 1971 to 1995. Mugurēvičs’s specialties are the archaeology of the Middle Ages of the Livonian period (the end of the twelfth century through the first half of the sixteenth century a.d.) and early written sources. Mugurēvičs led large-scale excavations in the flooded zone of the Pļaviņas hydro-station from 1958 to 1965 and was the administrator and coordinator of excavations in the flooded zones of the Rīga and Daugavpils hydro-stations (1966–1974; 1982–1987). He also led excavations in castles of the medieval period in Western Latvia (Rēzekne, Saldus, Piltene, Dundaga, and Sabile). His specialty is the adoption of Christianity in Livonia. He has been a member of the board of the international union of prehistoric and protohistoric sciences since 1994, and the president of the National Committee of Historical Sciences in Latvia since 1992.

Elvīra Šnore (1905–1996) studied at the State University in Rīga. Šnore was the founder of the study of scientific archaeology of the Middle Ages in Latvia with emphasis on earlier local inhabitants of the Iron Age (third to eighth centuries)—the Letgallians, Selonians, and Livs—and their material culture until the Middle Ages.

Šnore was the head of the Department of Archaeology of the State Museum of History from 1933 to 1944 and senior researcher at the Department of Archaeology of the Institute of History of Latvia from 1946 to 1984. She led archaeological excavations in the ninth-to- thirteenth-century hillfort of Asote from 1949 to 1954 and in the flooded zones of the Pļaviņas and Rīga hydro-stations, as well in the Lettgallian cemeteries of the Nukši and Kivti peoples of the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries.

Rauls Šnore (1901–1962), archaeologist and numismatist, studied at the State University in Rīga. Specializing in Iron Age archaeology in Latvia, Šnore was the director of the Museum of History in Rīga from 1936 to 1941, the manager of the Central Museum of History in Cēsis, Valmiera, and Valka from 1942 to 1946, the scientific director of the Rīgas Duomo Museum, and an assistant professor at the State University in Rīga from 1945 to 1946. Arrested in 1946 and sentenced to ten years of exile in prison, Šnore was deported to the republic of Mordovia and returned to Rīga in 1955 as an invalid. He excavated some Neolithic sites on the bank of Lake Lielais Ludzas in the last years of his life.

Adolfs Stubavs (1913–1986) studied pedagogy and received his doctorate in history at the State University in Rīga. He was head of the Department of Archaeology at the Institute of History of Latvia from 1958 to 1971. Stubavs’s specialty was the early and late Middle Ages. He led large-scale excavations at the Ķentes hillfort (fifth–ninth centuries a.d.), the Koknese hillfort