Born: 11 December 1856, Austria
Died: 9 August 1929
Country most active: Slovenia
Also known as: Marie of Windisch-Graetz
Dr. Doris Gutsmiedl-Schümann on early German-speaking archaeologists transcript
The following is excerpted from a 2025 interview with Dr. Doris Gutsmiedl-Schümann, co-investigator for AktArcha, a project researching early female archaeologists from German speaking areas. A German biography can be found on the AktArcha site.
Marie von Mecklenburg-Schwerin was of aristocratic background, and she’s especially known of her archaeological excavations in Slovenia and Austria. She was born princess of higher nobility in the Austro- Hungarian Habsburg Empire, and she was married at the age of 24 to her cousin, Paul Friedrich, Duke of Mecklenburg. Her husband was the son and later brother of two of the dukes of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in northern Germany. So you may have noticed the name Schwerin, which is also the place where Amalie Bucheim was museum’s curator. And this connects Marie von Mecklenburg-Schwerin to the collections Amalie Buchheim was taking care of. And as I mentioned before, Marie was guided through the collections by Amalie Buchheim as a young woman. We do not know if these visiting of the collections in Schwerin sparked her interest in archaeology.
So later in her life, in 1906, when Marie von Mecklenburg-Schwerin was 50 years old, she had to deal with some loss in her life. And as she was also in a financially precarious situation, she retired to a small castle of her family in Slovenia, and there she started to do archaeological excavations. She focused in her excavations especially on early Iron Age cemeteries dating from the 8th to the 5th century BC. She opened with her excavation workers more than 1,000 graves between 1906 and 1914. And through this work, she was building a collection of more than 20,000 prehistoric artifacts. She worked on the excavations herself, but she was not very fond of the excavation management. So all these responsibilities and duties she was leaving to her secretary, Gustav Goldberg. As her excavations were quite expensive, she had to pay for all the workers and for the collections and so on, she always needed money. So sometimes she succeeded to win over the Austrian and German emperors as patrons for their excavations, and did so by sending them splendid materials from her previous excavations.
In 1914, World War I started, and Marie von Mecklenburg-Schwerin has to leave Slovenia, and she had to leave behind her collection of 20,000 prehistoric artifacts. After World War I ended, Slovenia was no longer part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but it was a state of its own now, and all the family possessions, including her prehistoric collection, were confiscated by the new state. She tried to get the objects back during her life, but never succeeded. Only her daughter got them back later on. But as her daughter was not interested in archaeology, she sold the collections, and they are now partly in the collection of the Peabody Museum at the Harvard University in the USA, and partly in the Ashmolean Museum in the Oxford University in the UK. And there the objects were finally scientifically processed and published, and the Mecklenburg collections are still very well known in specialists in Iron Age archaeology.