Włodzimierz Hołubowicz: Pioneer of the Ethnoarchaeology of Pottery-Making

Abstract

Włodzimierz Hołubowicz (1908–1962) was a Polish archaeologist who was active before World War II in the academic milieu of Wilno (Vilnius), and after the War in Toruń and Wrocław. During his career he attached especially great importance to the field of methodology and methods of archaeological research. In this area he published a number of pioneer works, which greatly contributed to the methodological reconstruction of Polish archeology in the postwar years. In the years 1937–1939 he conducted ethnographic observations of pottery-making in the rural areas of north-eastern Poland (which, after the War, belonged administratively to Soviet republics, and which now belong to independent countries: Belarus and Lithuania). He continued ethnographic observations of pottery-making in Albania in 1952. In this way he became an unquestionable European pioneer of the idea of conducting field ethnographical observations by archaeologists in the context of still-existing traditional rural communities in order to gain information valuable for the interpretation of archaeological remains, an approach which much later became well known as ethnoarchaeology.