Archaeological research of Poles in Ukraine in the 19th and early 20th centuries

Abstract

The Polish lands under the rule of Austria were referred to as Eastern Galicia. Inhabitants of these areas represented various social and professional groups. For many of them, collecting and archaeological research has become a subject of serious interest. In this area, inhabited for centuries by various nations, there are numerous ruins, burial mounds, embankments and castles. This multitude of traces of past cultures forced us to search. This became the reason for a wide interest in the past and the development of collecting. Thus, the object of interest of nineteenth-century archeology, in the eyes of many researchers, were all monuments of the past, understood as the entirety of pre-historical, ethnographic, written and other sources. Accordingly, archeology should study all the creations of human hands from different epochs; creations ranging from the simplest to artistic and artful, material remains and traces of beliefs, worship and literature. The scope of the researchers’ interests included ancient temples, monuments of armaments, classical antiquities, archival science, archeography, sphragistics and numismatics.

In Ukraine and in other parts of the world, Poles lived and worked – in many economic and, of course – scientific fields. Many have devoted their attention, time and funds to searching for and studying traces of the distant past preserved in the ground. There are not many Polish publications about archaeological research conducted by Polish lovers of antiquity in eastern Ukraine, which were subject to tsarist Russia. This article attempts to fill this gap in the history of Polish archeology.