University of West Bohemia

Faculty Member, Department of Archaeology

Associate Professor

About

I fluctuate among several principal themes interconnecting only occasionally. Many years ago, I commenced with study of role of raw materials and specialized production in the late medieval society and undertook number of archaeological surveys and excavations in the Central and Western Bohemia addressing that issues (late medieval wood tar production, ore mining, siderurgy and non-ferrous metallurgy, mining and non-agrarian settlement in marginal zones, melting technology). In 1991 and 1992, I got a sad opportunity to witness as archaeologist the demolition of the Northwest Bohemian village Libkovice due to coal mining, which provoked my interest in living villages archaeology in Middle Europe as an important complement in the research of the medieval and early modern village evolution. During my PhD study at the Faculty of Architecture, Czech Technical University of Prague (1998-2006), I began to deepen my concern for the medieval urbanism, built environment and history of architecture which issued in several projects trying to apply a complex archaeological approach to medieval architectonic monuments, mainly monastic sites and urban centres (the research of the Benedictinian Abbey at Kladruby, Premonstratensian Abbey at Teplá, town nuclei of Plzeň, Starý Plzenec or Tachov). Continually I deal with the questions of the site/assemblage formation or transformations, stratigraphical analysis (as well as synthesis and interpretation) and of quantitative methods application in archaeology. The scholarship in Cairo in 2000 gave me a formative experience with the medieval archaeology of Near East („Islamic“ archaeology) which led me in 2006 to participation in, and later to heading of, the Czech archaeological mission in the Iraqi Kurdistan, where the town of Arbil, the Assyrian royal capital and important medieval regional centre, is currently in the research focus.

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