hydro-stations at Pļaviņas, Rīga, and Daugavpils (1958–1974; 1982–1987). The excavations of Old Town Rīga were continued. The funds of the Department of Archaeology of the Latvian Institute of History (the second main archaeological repository in Latvia) contain more than 176,000 artifacts and altogether 1.8 million accounting units, including archival data (1995).

Museum of the History of Latvia—The main archaeological repository of Latvia, founded on the basis of collections from the Committee of Science of Latvian Society in 1869 and the German Duomo Museum in 1936. The first expeditions for gathering stray finds (1894, 1895) and the first exhibition during the Tenth Archaeological Congress in Rīga (1896) were organized by the Latvian Society. A Department of Archaeology at the museum appeared in 1924, in the first years of independent Latvia, with the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Age sections. The department contained more than 10,000 artifacts in 1936, 130,000 in 1981, and 180,000 in 1999. Since 1930 the museum has been managed by the Board of Monument Protection. The department has included archaeologists Elvīra Šnore and Voldemārs Ģinters. Large-scale excavations at Mežotne and Dignāja hillfort were carried out during the 1930s. After the German Army occupied Rīga, work in the museum was reduced. Before the Soviet Army came some collections were prepared for evacuation and sent to Germany. At the end of the war the director of the museum, Voldemārs Ģinters, left Latvia and the Latvian collections were returned from Germany. During the Soviet period Lūcija Vankina—another second generation Latvian archaeologist—was the head of the Department of Archaeology. The department took part in the works at the Sarnate peat bog settlement and in the flooded zones of the Pļaviņas and Rīga hydro-stations. Archaeological exhibitions were organized several times; the best one was in 1975, when Swedish archaeologists came to Rīga for three days.

Museum of the History of Rīga and Navigation—The oldest museum in Latvia contains one-third of the main repository of archaeological collections in Latvia (140,000 artifacts). It contains the first collection of natural and historical materials, as well as pieces of art gathered by doctor N. Himzel and donated to the city after his death. In accordance with the decision of the town council his collections were made part of the museum in 1773. The collections were supplemented with artifacts from the Society of History and Antiquity of the Baltic provinces of Russia from 1858 to 1890 and then moved into the Duomo Museum (1891), where they were exhibited together with the coin collections. The first excavations in Rīga Old Town were carried out in 1938 (after the reorganization of the museum in 1936). A Department of Archaeology was founded in 1949.

Ilze Loze

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