Georg Leisner

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Georg Leisner (born September 2, 1870 in Kiel as Georg Klaus Leisner, † September 20, 1957 in Stuttgart ) was a German prehistorian specializing in megalithic systems on the Iberian Peninsula .

Life

Childhood and military service

The father, Leonhard Leisner (1846–1905) was a businessman and came from a family that had lived in the Eckernförde district since the 17th century . The mother, Elise, b. Thede (1834–1913) came from an old Kiel family of master craftsmen. Georg Leisner spent his childhood in Kiel, where he graduated from the Kiel School of Academics in 1891 with the final examination. He had enjoyed an anti-Prussian upbringing and joined the Bavarian army that same year. In the years 1900 and 1901 he participated in the campaigns of China due to the Boxer Rebellion in part, and from 1904 to 1905 at the Herero War in South West Africa . On his 39th birthday, on September 2, 1909, he married Amanda Vera de la Camp (1885–1972), who was fifteen years his junior . He had started as an officer in the military and took part in the First World War, but left the military as a lieutenant colonel at the end of the war in 1918 and began a new life with his wife. In 1918 the two bought a small farm in the Bavarian village of Höhenberg . After a stay of several months in Italy (1924/1925), during which the first archaeological studies were carried out, they gave up the agricultural project. Apparently both had developed a great interest in archeology, and so Georg Leisner took part in an expedition in 1926 that was undertaken by the then Institute for Cultural Morphology at the University of Frankfurt under the direction of Leo Frobenius to record rock art in Nubia .

academic education

Relearned in Bavaria Georg and Vera Leisner the Professor of Prehistory at the Complutense University of Madrid , Hugo Obermaier , know who Georg Leisner a study of Prehistory and Early History suggested. Georg then matriculated at the University of Munich in 1927. Vera still had to catch up on her Abitur. A year later they both moved to the University of Marburg , where Georg Leisner received his doctorate in 1932 under Gero von Merhart on megalithic tombs in the Spanish region of Galicia . In 1929 and 1930, he traveled with his wife to the Iberian Peninsula for seven months to record the footage, including the Algarve , where they visited Alcalar . The idea arose to compose a megalithic tomb corpus for the Iberian Peninsula.

The megalithic tombs of the Iberian Peninsula

Without official financial support, Georg and Vera Leisner traveled three times to the south of the Iberian Peninsula, to east and west Andalusia and to Portugal until 1934 , where they began to systematically record the megalithic tombs in field work and in museums. They also got to know the then most important specialists for the Neolithic and the Copper Age of the Iberian Peninsula (see Vera Leisner ). When the Spanish civil war broke out , they had to return to Germany, where they worked out the first volume, “The South”, of the planned corpus “The megalithic tombs of the Iberian Peninsula” and published it in 1943. That year they moved into an apartment in Munich, which fell victim to the bombs of World War II that same year . Numerous records and important research material were also burned. After various attempts to get an exit visa, they finally succeeded in 1943, and so they continued their work in Portugal. The loss of her Munich apartment prompted her to stay in Lisbon permanently. An epoch marked by financial difficulties followed, in which they lived mainly on research assignments from Portuguese colleagues, especially with the help of G. Cordeiro Ramos, the then President of the Instituto de Alta Cultura, Ministério de Educação Nacional. At times they also had a grant from Siemens . As her literature list shows, these years were also very productive in terms of megalithic tomb research. When the Madrid department of the German Archaeological Institute was reopened after the war on March 3, 1954, the research of the Leisner couple received renewed funding from the German Research Foundation . Georg Leisner was able to experience the publication of the first of the four planned volumes of the megalithic tomb corpus on the west of the Iberian Peninsula in 1956 in the newly founded series of Madrid Researches . The second volume, on which he had still worked, appeared only in 1959, about two years after his death. He died on September 20, 1957 in Stuttgart .

Publications

  • Georg Leisner: Distribution and typology of the Galician-North Portuguese megalithic tombs . Marburg 1938. (Dissertation Marburg 1932, Reprint Lisboa 1977).
  • Georg Leisner: Antas dos Arredores de Évora . Estudos de História, Arte e Arqueologia III. Edições Nazareth, Évora 1949.
  • Georg Leisner, Vera Leisner: The megalithic tombs of the Iberian Peninsula. The south . Roman-Germanic Research Vol. 17. Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin 1943.
  • Georg Leisner, Vera Leisner: The megalithic tombs of the Iberian Peninsula. The west . Madrid Research Vol. 1, 1. Verlag Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin 1956.
  • Georg Leisner, Vera Leisner: The megalithic tombs of the Iberian Peninsula. The west . Madrid Research Vol. 1, 2nd Verlag Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin 1959.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Personal communication from Vera Leisner to Hermanfrid Schubart around 1970.
  2. ↑ Hermanfrid Schubart: In: Problems of megalithic grave research. Madrid Research Vol. 16. Berlin, New York 1990. pp. 1-2, and information noted by Vera Leisner's sister, Terese de la Camp.
personal data
SURNAME Leisner, Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German prehistorian and archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 2, 1870
PLACE OF BIRTH Kiel
DATE OF DEATH 20th September 1957
Place of death Stuttgart