Otto Rubensohn's Excavations on Paros I

Otto Rubensohn’s Excavations on Paros I: The Sanctuaries on Kounados Hill is the first volume in a forthcoming series of editions of archival sources from the estate of the German archaeologist Otto Rubensohn, housed in the archives of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. It contains the transcription of three texts concerning the sites (small ancient sanctuaries) on Kounados Hill on the Greek island of Paros (in the Cyclades), with the original photos.

Otto Rubensohn (1867-1964) was a German archaeologist of Jewish origin. Although his involvement in the field of archaeology was relatively short and he spent most of his career teaching in elementary and secondary schools, he is now one of the respected German archaeologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, primarily because of his excavations on the Greek island of Paros and in Egypt. Unfortunately, his importance for German and Greek Classical archaeology and Egyptology is still not fully understood and appreciated.

As the sanctuaries on Kounados were rather preliminarily published by Rubensohn and haven’t been excavated (or thoroughly investigated) in the last 120 years, the transcription and publication of the unpublished texts and images will add some new information on these sites as well as on the history of archaeology in Greece at the turn of the last centuries.

The book is intended for archaeologists, dealing with Greek archaeology, and historians specializing in the history of archaeology (or the history of science and intellectual history in general).