History of the Collection of Physical Anthropology in the Natural ...

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Wiedenmayer/Hotz, History of the Collection... Fig. 1: View into the Anthropological Collection in the present storage area “K2”. situation was changed in 1946 by a decree of the City Council, granting the Völkerkundemuseum the sole rights to store human skeletal remains. At about this time, construction work in Basel had much increased. In cooperation with locally based archaeologists (Rudolf Laur- Belart of the Historical Museum, Rudolf Moosbrugger and Rolf d’Aujourd’hui of Archäologische Bodenforschung des Kantons Basel-Stadt), much skeletal material and its documentation came to be housed in the Völkerkundemuseum. The most important excavation sites on city grounds, with hundreds of graves, are two lateceltic settlements (Jud, 1995), a late-roman to early medieval cemetery (Fellmann Brogli et al., 1992), an Alamannic cemetery (Giesler-Müller, 1992), a Franconian cemetery (Martin, 1976), late medieval finds from excavations in seven churches (Kaufmann, 1987), and a Jewish cemetery of the 13th and 14th centuries (Kollmann and Kahnt, 1885; Bay, 1942 and unpublished; Teuber, 1942). The human remains of the last-mentioned excavation were 42
Bull. Soc. Suisse d’Anthrop. 8(1), 41-53. afterwards reinterred in the present Israelitic Cemetery in Basel, after their anthropological study by Roland Bay. The artifacts of all these sites are kept in the Historical Museum and in the Archäologische Bodenforschung Basel-Stadt. Due to lack of space and facilities for study, all the physical-anthropological collections were transferred from the Völkerkundemuseum to the Naturhistorisches Museum in 1971, where they are now kept in K2, a spacious, modern, bomb-proof and air-conditioned underground storage area. The Interkantonale Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Anthropologie (IAG, Intercantonal Cooperative for Anthropology), in which twelve Cantonal Services of Archaeology of Switzerland participated (cantons AG, BL, BS, BE, FR, GR, LU, SG, SH, SO, TG, ZG), moved from Berne to Basel in 1973 and was then led by Bruno Kaufmann, former Assistent of Roland Bay. Generally, a shift towards an interest in historical anthropology could be observed throughout Switzerland. With the accession of the above-mentioned collection from the Institute of Anatomy in 1975, palaeopathology gained importance as one of the research topics with the cooperation of the retired pathologist Siegfried Scheidegger (1903-1989, Professor of Anatomy and Pathology at the University of Basel). Three further more important collections have been incorporated from 1988 onwards: 1. In 1988 and 1989, following the planning of a park in the centre of the city, part of a former cemetery of the City Hospital (Spitalfriedhof St. Johann) had to be excavated. The cemetery was in use from 1845 to 1868. Of a total of 2561 deceased patients buried therein, 1061 skeletons were excavated, documented and measured. From these, 221 individuals were selected for preservation and some 400 skulls and postcranial parts with pathological lesions. 40 30 females males 20 10 0 0-9 10-19 20-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60-69 70-79 80-89 90-99 age unknown age class (year) Fig. 2: Demography of the Spitalfriedhof Collection (67 female, 126 male; 27 individuals with un– known age). 43
Page 1: Bull. Soc. Suisse d’Anthrop. 8(1)
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History of the Collection of Physical Anthropology in the Natural ...

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