Archaeology Curatorship

This curatorship began its work in 1958, when the Dolenjska Museum employed its first archaeologist, Tone Knez, who performed this work up until 1993. Today the curatorship provides work for two archaeologists, a museum document officer and two conservation and restoration technicians. These employees, together with students and public works staff, see to the collecting, examining, documenting, conserving, restoring and safeguarding of the movable archaeological heritage, as far as they are able. The main difficulty we face is a lack of repository space and the large quantity of tiny archaeological objects that we have obtained through protective excavations, and which still need to be conserved and restored.

The curatorship safeguards material from the late Stone Age up to the early Middle Ages, with the main body of material comprising finds from the late Bronze Age, and from the early and late Iron Age. Protective archaeological excavations on the Chapter House field in Novo Mesto, which Dolenjska Museum staff have been carrying out every year since 1983 for four to six months, have yielded for the most part ceramic, metal, glass and amber objects. Finds are processed in the local restoration workshop (which functions jointly with the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, Novo Mesto Unit), and by contract in other workshops in Slovenia as well as in the RGZM workshops at Mainz in Germany. Objects are systematically incorporated into temporary exhibitions (Novo Mesto before the Illyrians, The Chapter House Field, The Celts in Novo Mesto, Draga pri Beli Cerkvi, Glass and Amber of Novo Mesto) and in this way were are already preparing material for a new permanent presentation which we are planning for the coming years.

We present material in exhibition catalogues and brochures, and we also publish the collection Carniola Archaeologica, in which to date we have produced five volumes featuring material from the early Iron Age and Antiquity found in Novo Mesto. The Museum has also obtained large quantities of archaeological material from sites revealed in the construction of the motorway in the Dolenjska region, in which Museum staff cooperate.

The Archaeology Curatorship keeps over 20,000 colour slides, around 23,000 black and white negatives, a substantial collection of digital photographs, more than 15,000 complete archaeological objects and a collection of almost 700 archaeological posters.

The major portion of our work is prioritised towards protective archaeological excavation at the Chapter House field and processing material obtained there, whereby through lectures, articles and exhibitions we present the heritage of Dolenjska to local and foreign audiences.

exhibition »

Novo mesto, Kapiteljska njiva, bronasti certoški fibuli in železna sekira v grobu, 5. - 4. stoletje pr. n. št.

Novo mesto, Kapiteljska njiva, grob V/35, jantarna ogrlica, 5. - 4. stoletje pr. n. št.