Archaeologist Mechyslav Yakymovych (1868-1945): Life and Scientific Activity in Epoch of Revolutions and World Wars
Abstract
The life path of the archaeologist Mechyslav Konstiantynovych (Kostovych) Yakymovych is reconstructed and some details of his biography are clarified in the paper. Little-known documents and materials covering various stages of the scholar’s activity are brought into scientific circulation, namely: open letter dated December 14, 1916, given by the Imperial Archaeological Commission to M.K. Yakymovych; biography with the covering petition prepared and written by the scholar himself in early 1929 for the All-Ukrainian Archaeological Committee of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences; letter-request of the director of the Uman Historical Museum M.K. Yakymovych to the German government, dated April 1941; personal letters of M.K. Yakymovych to P.P. Kurinnyi dated February 14, 1942, and June 8, 1943; author’s drawings. A list of printed works of the archaeologist, published during his lifetime, has been compiled. It is emphasized that M.K. Yakymovych was well-known among the professional community of the late 19th – first half of the 20th century and collaborated with the leading archeological institutions of the time, among which: the Imperial Archaeological Commission, VUAK (All-Ukrainian Archaeological Committee), the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, and the Institute of Archeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
M.K. Yakymovych was born on December 25, 1868, in Zhytomyr, in 1877 he entered the gymnasium, and in 1886 he got a secondary education in a private boarding school, during 1888-1896 he served for the ‘Society of Steamship on the Dnipro River and Its Tributaries’, and after that, until 1927 (with a break in 1921-1922) he served in Kyiv Excise Board. From 1929 he was officially employed at Uman Museum.
From the 1890s until the end of his life, he studied various archeological sites on the territory of modern Ukraine. In particular, he recorded dune locations and workshops in Polissia on both banks of the rivers Prypiat, Uzh, and Teteriv; found a cremation with a bronze fibula in the ceramic pot near the urochyshche Pechyshche near the village of Zalissia; excavated the tombs of Dregoviches on the right bank of the river Teterev next to the village Nizhylovychi near Radomyshl; studied two mounds, a cemetery, and a settlement of the Nogais near the village of Hoffnungstal and Trypillia sites on the outskirts of the village Stara Buda in Zvenyhorod region; explored the sights near the town of Liubech; since the 1920s, the archaeologist had been conducting surveys and excavations in collaboration with the Uman Museum; during the second half of the 1930s, he continued the archeological study of the region, first of all on the outskirts of the villages of Volodymyrivka, Tomashivka, and Sushkivka. During the German-Soviet war, he did not give up hope of resuming the surveys of Trypillia sites.
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