Jindřich Wankel

Heinrich Wankel ( Jindřich Wankel ) ( born July 15, 1821 in Prague, † April 5, 1897 in Olomouc ) was a Bohemian doctor, prehistorians and speleologist. In his excavations in the caves of the Moravian Karst, he managed a number of findings that are of importance for the history of Moravia.

Life

Heinrich Wankel was born into a German - Czech family. His father was Damian Wankel, a German official in Prague, his mother Magdalena, nee Black, came from a Czech family home. Henry attended German schools and studied in Prague as a pupil of the anatomist Josef Hyrtl medicine. He graduated in 1847 and began working in a Prague hospital. In the revolutionary year of 1848 he took part in street battles and provided victims of street fighting. In the same year he received his doctorate in Vienna. He became an assistant Hyrtl at Vienna University, but the following year he moved to Moravia, to a job as a factory doctor in the ironworks of Count Hugo Karl zu Salm - Reifferscheidt, a son of the industrialist and naturalist Hugo Franz Altgraf Salm- Reifferscheidt, to accept in Jedovnice.

In addition to his professional activities Wankel explored the caves in the Moravian Karst. He began to collect the bones of Ice Age animals to identify them and put them together from the remains found whole skeletons. 1851 Wankel married eleven years younger citizens daughter Elizabeth. The marriage produced four daughters were born. The family lived in Blansko where Salm made ​​a house available to the physician. Wankel could harness the count's miners in his excavations. Since the 1850s he published his research results in scientific journals in Bohemia, Vienna and Leipzig.

1867 saw Wankel at the World Exhibition in Paris pieces from La Madeleine. He recognized the similarity with its own discoveries in the Bull Rock Cave. In the following years he intensified his activities there and he managed a number of finds that to this day have implications for prehistoric research, especially the so-called " Hallstatt burial ". It consists of the remains of about 40 people and numerous objects from the Hallstatt period, including a bull floats and a statuette of bronze. The finds brought Wankel international recognition. He was one of the first members of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory, which was founded in 1869 by Rudolf Virchow in Mainz, and he was a member of the Vienna Anthropological Society. The Danish zoologist Iapetus Steenstrup described him in 1888 as "the father of Austrian history ."

1883 Heinrich Wankel was retired and lost the right to his official residence, where his collection of over 8000 pieces found, including the human skeletons from the Bull Rock Cave. The Moravian Museum in Brno and the National Museum in Prague rejected a purchase. Finally Wankel sold the collection for 12,000 guilders the Anthropological Society in Vienna, which she gave to the Vienna Natural History Museum. There she is today.

One of his grandsons was the speleologist and archaeologist Karl Absolon who continued his life's work.

Works (selection)

• The human bones found in the Býčískálahöhle. Mitt D. Anthr. Ges Vienna I, in 1871.
• Prehistoric iron smelting and forging facilities in Moravia. Mitt D. Anthr. Ges Vienna VIII, in 1879.
• Images from the Moravian Switzerland and their past. Vienna 1882.
• Contribution to the history of the Slavs in Europe. Olomouc in 1885.