Bernhard Gramsch

Bernhard Gramsch (born April 11, 1934 in Berlin ) is a German prehistoric archaeologist and was director of the Museum for Pre- and Early History in Potsdam .

Life

After graduating from high school in 1952, Gramsch worked for a short time as a warehouse worker before he began studying history , prehistory and early history and Quaternary geology at Berlin's Humboldt University in 1952. Four years later he obtained his diploma in the subjects of prehistory and early history as well as quaternary geology.

From 1956 to 1957 he worked on a fixed-term contract as a research assistant at the Institute for Pre- and Protohistory at the Humboldt University. In 1957/58 he took part in a funding process of the Institute for Pre- and Protohistory of the German Academy of Sciences . Then he went, also as a research assistant, to the Museum of Prehistory and Protohistory in Potsdam , which had only been founded a few years earlier . Back at the Berlin Humboldt University, Gramsch worked on his dissertation from 1959 to 1962, and from 1959 to 1961 as a planned academic aspirant. A year later he received his doctorate in June with the dissertation “Investigations on the Mesolithic in the northern and central lowlands between the Elbe and Oder”. Reviewers were Karl-Heinz Otto and Paul Grimm .

In 1963 and 1964, Bernhard Gramsch took part in two expeditions of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin , which were dedicated to the documentation of Sudanese rock art before they were flooded by the Aswan Dam .

On March 1, 1965, Bernhard Gramsch was appointed director of the Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Potsdam, a position he would hold for 26 years. He had taken over the youngest of the five archaeological state museums on the territory of the GDR. He devoted himself to its expansion and soon a permanent archaeological exhibition was set up in Babelsberg Castle . In addition, he published the "Publications of the Museum for Prehistory and Early History Potsdam" from Volume 4 to Volume 25 as scientific yearbooks.

Bernhard Gramsch was appointed in 1965 as a member of the advisory board for the preservation of monuments at the GDR Ministry for Higher and Technical Schools and remained in this body until it was dissolved in 1990. In 1980, he succeeded Werner Coblenz as chairman of this body and remained in this position until 1989 In addition, Bernhard Gramsch was one of the four German specialist representatives in the Conseil Permanent of the Union Internationale des Sciences Préhistoriques et Protohistoriques (UISPP).

For several decades, Bernhard Gramsch taught at the Humboldt University in Berlin and, in the 1980s, at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg . Under the title “Beginnings of Primitive Society” he gave the students an introduction to the periods of the Paleolithic and Mesolithic . The Facultas Docendi gained Gramsh 1977. In 1979 he was appointed honorary lecturer at Humboldt University. From 1981 he gave guest lectures at universities in Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands; in 1986 he took on a two-week teaching position at the archaeological institute of the University of Rome . From 1991 to 1999 he was a research assistant in the Brandenburg Monument Preservation. In 2000 he was honored for his work with the Rudolf Virchow Lecture .

Important excavations that Bernhard Gramsch carried out took place on Rügen , among other places . The excavations, which have become known nationwide, were dedicated to the Lietzow culture at sites in Ralswiek -Augustenhof and Lietzow -Buddelin. The most important excavation under his direction took place from 1977 to 1989 on a Mesolithic site near Friesack . The site where people were settled around a hundred times between 9200 and 5200 BC. Could be proven is of European importance.

Publications

• The Mesolithic in the lowlands between the Elbe and the Oder (= publications by the Museum for Pre- and Early History Potsdam. 7, ISSN  0079-4376 ). VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1973.
• Signs of wear on Mesolithic core and disc axes. In: excavations and finds . Vol. 11, No. 3, 1966, pp. 109-114.
• with Klaus Kloss: Excavations near Friesack: An Early Mesolithic Marshland Site in the Northern Plain of Central Europe. In: Clive Bonsall (Ed.): The Mesolithic in Europe. Papers Presented at the Third International Symposium, Edinburgh, 1985. John Donald, Edinburgh 1989, ISBN 0-85976-205-X , pp. 313-324.
• Friesack: Last hunters and gatherers in Brandenburg. In: Yearbook of the Roman-Germanic Central Museum Mainz. Vol. 47, No. 1, 2000, ISSN  0076-2741 , pp. 51-96.
• Late Mesolithic settlement and sea level development at the Littorina coastal sites of Ralswiek-Augustenhof and Lietzow-Buddelin. In: Reinhard Lampe (Ed.): Holocene evolution of the south-western Baltic coast. Geological, archaeological and paleo-environmental aspects. Field meeting on INQUA Subcommission V Sea-level Changes and Coastal Evolution, Western Europe, September 22–27, 2002 (= Greifswalder Geographical Works. 27). Ernst Moritz Arndt University, Greifswald 2002, ISBN 3-86006-196-8 , pp. 37–45.

literature

• Erwin Cieszla, Thomas Kersting, Stefan Pratsch (eds.): “ Tension the bow ...” Festschrift for Bernhard Gramsch on his 65th birthday (= contributions to the prehistory and early history of Central Europe. 20). 2 volumes. Beier & Beran, Weissbach 1999, ISBN 3-930036-35-5 .
• Lothar Mertens : The lexicon of the GDR historians. Biographies and bibliographies on the historians from the German Democratic Republic. Saur, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-598-11673-X , p. 243.

Web links

• Literature by and about Bernhard Gramsch in the catalog of the German National Library

Remarks

1. ↑ 1973 according to Mertens: The Lexicon of GDR Historians. 2006, p. 243.
2. ↑ Bernhard Gramsch: Friesack: Last hunters and gatherers in Brandenburg. In: Yearbook of the Roman-Germanic Central Museum Mainz. Vol. 47, No. 1, 2000, ISSN  0076-2741 , pp. 51-96.