Josef Szombathy - Biography

Josef Szombathy (1853-1943), was an Austrian archaeologist, who found the Venus of Willendorf in 1908.

The Venus of Willendorf is an 11.1 cm (4 3/8 inches) high statuette of a female figure, discovered at a paleolithic site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria near the city of Krems. It is carved from an oolitic limestone that is not local to the area, and tinted with red ochre. It was estimated to have been carved between 24,000 - 22,000 BCE.

As a result of this and other finds, he founded the Department of Prehistory at the Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna in 1882. Szombathy collected finds from all over the Austro-Hungarian empire, including Galicia, Bukovina, Bohemia, Moravia, Krain and Wojwodina

Josef Szombathy died normally in 1943.

Bibliography

• "Die Aurignacienschichten in Löss von Willendorf," Korrespondenzblatt der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie, und Urgeschichte, XL (1909), 85-88

External links

• History of the Willendorf Project