History of research at Švédův stůl Cave in the Moravian Karst

Abstract

This article provides an overview of the published archaeological, geological, anthropological, and paleontological research that has been undertaken at Švédův stůl Cave at Ochoz u Brna in the southern part of the Moravian Karst. Most of these excavations took place from the end of the 19th century to the present and have already been described in the literature; however, to date, there has been no comprehensive review for an English-speaking audience. The authors focus on the excavations of Bohuslav Klíma between 1953–1955 and the discovery of a Neanderthal’s mandible by the student Karl Kubasek in 1905, and the circumstances under which this find entered the collections of the Moravian Museum in Brno. The article also includes, for the first time ever, photographs from the Bohuslav Klíma archive documenting his excavations in the cave in the 1950s. This documentation was also used to place the test pits excavated in front of the cave in 2019 by an international research team in the spatial framework of Klíma’s excavations.