In December 2005, the Archeology Department of the State Hermitage marked 75 years from the date of its founding. It was originally called at the time the “Department of Pre-Class Society,” whereas today’s name is the Department of Archeology of Eastern Europe and Siberia.

The anniversary of the Archeology Department was observed by a special scientific conference held from 15 - 17 December. Among those who gathered to congratulate the Department on its milestone date were colleagues and friends from within the Hermitage and other research institutions of St Petersburg including the State University, the Kunstkammer, the Institute of History of Material Culture; moreover, there were also archeologists from Moscow, Yekaterinburg and Perm. Congratulatory speeches were delivered by Director of the Hermitage Mikhail Piotrovsky; by representatives of the board of directors of the Institute of Archeology, Russian Academy of Sciences; the Institute of History of Material Culture; and the Department of Archeology, St Petersburg University.

The reports by conference participants, about one third of which were prepared by employees of the Department of Archeology themselves, fall into two groups. The first session of the conference, which included the formal celebratory part, heard reports from I.L. Tikhonov, Yu.Yu. Piotrovsky and M.D. Kuznetsovaya dealing with the period before the formation of an archeology department in the Hermitage, the first results of its activity in research and exhibitions, and a short sketch of the activity of its staff over the course of the 75 years from 1930 to 2005.

The work of the conference which followed was devoted to a review of the basic scholarly issues which constitute the contemporary interests of the Hermitage’s archeologists and take in all sorts of aspects of the study of ancient culture from the Paleolithic to the Middle Ages.

At the conference

The conference at work