The precise location of the find is not known, so we can only suppose that the bone referred to might have been a mammoth femur, dug out from one of the sunken lanes along the slopes of the Pálava. Likewise, we can only assume that analogous finds over the course of previous centuries of fossilized bones, teeth and also conspicuous white stones or “flints” were ploughed up each year by peasants going about their regular work on the land, which is why they appeared not just in the school collections of surrounding villages, but also in the pubs and shops of area.
Further information about similar discoveries appears at the start of the 19th century. In 1801, the Moravian chronicler and governor of Mikulov castle František Jozef Schwoy wrote to theFrench naturalist Georges Cuvier about the discovery of mammoth bones in Pavlov. The same year he submitted a report to the Patriotisches Tageblatt in which he informed readers of the discovery near Pavlov in 1785 of mammoth teeth, which were apparently lying in an ash layer at a depth of 3.5 metres. In 1889, Karel Jaroslav Maška describes in a Viennese tourist magazine the finding of fossils at Horní Věstonice, specifically mentioning the remains of reindeer, mammoth, rhinoceros and Arctic foxes, while in 1902, in his work entitled Neue prähistorische Funde aus Mähren, Antonín Rzehak devotes his attention to Palaeolithic stone artefacts (crudely hewn small implements from flint and chert) from Milovice.
The first individuals to discover the classic site of Dolní Věstonice I are presented in the literature as Dr. Johann Schön, a local doctor who practised in Dolní Věstonice from 1862 until his death in 1895, and the Czech pastor František Mazour, an enthusiastic naturalist who between 1894–1910 was the parish priest in Pavlov. Dr. Johann Schön collected mammoth bones from the clay pit of the local brickworks, as the occasion arose, and similarly gathered flint implements from the hollow ways on route to Pavlov. He then exhibited these finds in his surgery and explained them as mementoes of the ancient inhabitants of the region. On his regular journeys from Pavlov to Dolní Věstonice, František Mazour would also find on the aforementioned sunken lane, cut into the loess ridge of the area, the fossilized bones of Pleistocene animals and flint artefacts, and set up at the vicarage a little “diluvial-geological” space on his mantle-piece to store them.
Karel Absolon and the first systematic survey
Dolní Věstonice made its first official entrance into Moravian archaeology in 1922, when Jozef Matzura, writer and castle governor in Mikulov, and Karl Jüttner, a professor at the Mikulov Grammar School, based on their acquisition of finds of flint artefacts (notified by local farmer Thomas Hebaur from Horní Věstonice) and following their joint visit to the place of discovery, published a report entitled Mammuthjäger an den Pollauer Bergen (Mammoth Hunters on the Pavlov Hills), which appeared in the daily newspaper Tagesbote aus Mahren (volume 72, no. 293, dated 28.6.1922).
The discovery site rapidly became the focal point of amateur archaeologists from Brno (H. Freising, R. Czižek, F. Čupik and K. Schirmeisen), who came to collect surface finds and dug the first modest trenches. By 5 November 1923, Hans Freising had already laid his hands on the first exceptional find from the site – a small ceramic figure of a mammoth. These activities came to the attention of the famous Viennese archaeologist and Director of the Natural History Museum, Josef Bayer, who visited Dolní Věstonice in person in May 1924 and wrote up a short expert report on the site. The monograph confirmed the site’s unique significance and emphasized the need for a systematic survey of the site in order to limit the breaking up of assemblages into various private collections.
Starting, therefore, in 1924, prof. dr. Karel Absolon (1877–1960) began to systematically work each year in Dolní Věstonice, and for the first time he found himself working in the name of an official Czechoslovak institution – the Moravian Museum. During the first season of excavations, Jan Knies and Václav Čapek participated importantly by surveying the terrain, and from 1925 the excavations in the field were led by the museum laboratory technician Emanuel Dania (1901–1974), who kept Karel Absolon regularly informed on the progress of the site. Continuing right up until 1938, when Dolní Věstonice was taken over by the German army, Karel Absolon had been regularly astonishing the contemporary world with a series of unique finds.
Of the many finds from that period, perhaps the most outstanding was the statuette Venus of Dolní Věstonice, discovered at the start of excavations in 1925. But other ceramic statues of people and animals were also discovered; there were other artistic miniatures carved from mammoth tusks (e.g. a life-like miniature of a female head), decorative artefacts, the grave of a child and other anthropological finds, extensive middens of mammoth bone waste and huge quantities of stone and bone tools. These new discoveries were trumpeted in the national and international press by Karel Absolon, and were presented in their entirety to the public at the Brno Fair Grounds as part of the special Anthropos exposition, which later gave rise to a modern exhibition pavilion close by in Brno’s Pisárecký Park. Absolon’s entire conception of his work was pioneering. It was not simply a question of amassing “flints” or “Venuses”, but involved reconstructing the life of one of the earliest settlements and its prehistoric inhabitants. By pursuing this approach, Karel Absolon laid the foundations of Moravian palaeontology.
The archaeological work at Dolní Věstonice is also connected with attempts to deceive the public with forgeries of Gravettian artistic artefacts, in particular female figurines. In 1927, Franz Müllender, a landowner from Horní Věstonice, sought to pass off a primitive Venus-like figurine carved from mammoth ivory as prehistoric. In order to raise the public’s interest in the piece, the story was put about, most likely by Müllender himself, that he wanted to sell it abroad illegally. This prompted the authorities to intervene and thereupon followed disputes among experts as to the authenticity of the “Venus”, the principal consequence of which was to cement the fame of the Palaeolithic site in the public consciousness still further.
Wartime intermezzo
The global significance of Dolní Věstonice was also known to the German occupiers and to Dutch archaeologist Assien Bohmers (1912–1988), who was appointed to head the excavation – now directly organized by the SS through its Ahnenerbe organization. The research could also, to some extent, be related to the geopolitical and racist theories of Nazi Germany.
The war had an overall tragic impact on the site because that part of the unique collection of finds which had been transferred to Mikulov Castle was destroyed in a fire that engulfed the fortress at the very close of the war in April 1945. Luckily, the Venus of Dolní Věstonice remained together with other unique artistic artefacts in Brno, thus escaping destruction.
Bohuslav Klíma and research by the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences
Straight after the war, the leading lights of Czechoslovak archaeology began looking for the best strategy for future surveys at Dolní Věstonice. Management of the project was gradually assumed by the Institute of Archaeology, integrated from 1953 into the structure of the Academy of Sciences, and indeed the same institution has successfully continued its activity in this area through to the present. Another new post-war feature was to be the more systematic collaboration between multiple institutions and between different sub-fields, especially those in the sciences. This multi-disciplinary approach contributed greatly to research and excavation at Dolní Věstonice. The mantle of head of research was relinquished by Karel Absolon and passed for several decades to Bohuslav Klíma (1925–2000), who extended the scope of investigation from the area around Dolní Věstonice I to the newly discovered sites of Pavlov Iand II, where digs were carried out almost every year right up until the 1970s.
During these surveys, Bohuslav Klíma gathered up a vast quantity of archaeological material – thousands of pieces from chipped stone industry, tools from organic materials, collections of statuettes, carvings and decorations. Also discovered were the first ritual graves – the grave of a woman (DV 3) and of a man (Pavlov 1). All finds were supplemented with important dating drawn from geology and science.
Compared to previous periods, this new archaeological research brought about a marked methodological leap forward. The survey strategy consisted of integrated area excavations, with the whole site gridded into individual squares. This enabled the detailed registration and documentation of the chronology of settlement layers, settlement structures and the accumulation of artefacts within the space. The positions of trenches and important finds were precisely measured geodetically, while sieving and flotation of the cultural layer enabled the retrieval of even the very smallest finds.
Further important discoveries were made in the 1980s, when the construction of the Nové mlýny Water Works entered its final stages. The extraction of loess to build dykes meant opening up new, this time rescue, excavations at the location of Dolní Věstonice II and Milovice I. Owing to the extraction procedure, the rescue excavations were carried out over large areas and under time constraints, which required pooling the strengths of many archaeologists. Bohuslav Klíma was joined in his research at Dolní Věstonice by Jiří Svoboda from the Institute of Archaeology of the CAS, Brno, while surveys at Milovice were led by Martin Oliva from the Moravian Museum.
In 1986 at Dolní Věstonice II was uncovered the joint grave of three young people (DV 13–15) (→ Exhibit 9.1), followed by another discovery a year later – the grave of a man interred inside a hut (DV 16).
Jiří Svoboda and a comprehensive picture of Gravettian culture
In 1995, the newly conceived Palaeolithic and Palaeoethnology Centre was established under the auspices of the Czech Academy of Sciences at the original excavation headquarters in Dolní Věstonice. Its founder and leader is prof. PhDr. Jiří Svoboda, DrSc. Besides comprehensively processing and publishing the finds amassed so far, the centre is engaged in other excavations at known and newly discovered archaeological sites in the region – Dolní Věstonice II, IIa and III, Pavlov I, II and VI, and Milovice IV. The cultural layers of the Gravettian are not only continuing to be exposed and threatened by work on new buildings, utility infrastructure and earth works, but also the kind of accident that occurred in 2009, when a road collapsed into forgotten cellars beneath the village of Milovice.
Owing to its many years of experience, the Palaeolithic and Palaeoethnology Centre also conducts surveys employing similar methodology at other hunter sites in the Czech Republic and abroad. Recently, for example, survey work has been carried out at a hunting-fishing site in a Holocene forest context (Mesolithic sandstone areas of Northern Bohemia), whereas other comparative research has focused on living populations of hunters and herders in Siberia. In the last few years, two anthropological-archaeological expeditions have been undertaken in Ethiopia, to the regions of Afar and the Blue Nile.
The current activities of the workplace annex at Dolní Věstonice reflect current trends in survey work, which are moving away from the area excavation of Palaeolithic culture and territory and instead focus on promising sites in greater detail. Currently under investigation are hunting adaptation and social structures in a changing climate and landscape.
Interdisciplinary and international teams, drawing together the very best experts from abroad, are working to develop a concept for the comprehensive analysis of the site. The range of methods used in such analysis is continuing to broaden, and now includes promising new techniques such as molecular genetics and other laboratory methods for analysing animal and human osteological material.
The aim is to create a three-dimensional picture of the first anatomically modern human population in Europe, one that includes the way people lived, hunted and the rhythm of the seasons. The significance of the Dolní Věstonice – Pavlov area is confirmed by its declaration as a National Cultural Monument. Since 1994, the scientific findings of the Palaeolithic and Palaeoethnology Centre have been published in the series Dolnověstonické studie, whose interdisciplinary reporting now runs to 20 volumes.