SAA

PROS AND CONS OF CONSULTING COLLECTORS
Figure 1. Map of the Lehr Neolithic site showing Albert Kley’s surface collection subareas. This documentation allowed us to identify areas dominated by
Early vs. Middle Neolithic ceramics.
In the 1920s, Albert Kley (1907–2000) studied archaeology at
the University of Tübingen before shifting to a career as a
teacher (Schreg 2007). In the 1930s, he began surveying to
locate Mesolithic and Paleolithic sites on the Swabian Alb.
Instead, he discovered many Neolithic sites, completely
unknown in the area then. Kley divided them into subareas
within which he collected, labeled, and mapped surface finds
(Figure 1). This allowed us to analyze the spatial distribution
of artifacts at sites such as Lehr, which was destroyed by
highway construction in the 1970s (Knipper et al. 2005). In
1969, Kley documented the first Early Neolithic (LBK) longhouses
in southwestern Germany when the site of Bollingen
was impacted by construction. He also discovered later prehistoric
sites, including early medieval settlements (Schreg
2007). Kley’s observations laid the foundation for a German-
Austrian project investigating medieval settlement dynamics
through large scale geophysical survey (Kastowsky-
Priglinger et al. 2013).
Kley was president of the Society of Arts and History and
director of the local museum in Geislingen. These institutions
funded his research activities and enabled him to
exhibit his finds. However, as a private person he often
lacked basic equipment. For example, without access to a
copy machine, he struggled to piece together 1:50 field drawings
over nearly .6 ha at the Bollingen LBK settlement.
26 The SAA Archaeological Record • November 2015