Ivan Borkovský

Under threat of being sent to a concentration camp Borkovský was forced to issue a paper identifying the skeleton as of Germanic origin and to withdraw a book publicising early Slavic pottery from the area.

After the war he carried out further excavations in Prague, including at the Levý Hradec, and served as chairman of the Archaeological Society of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.

Ivan Borkovský was born on 8 September 1897 at Chortovec, near Horodenka, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria and since 1991 lies in West Ukraine.

Borkovský found that his previous education was not recognised by the Czechoslovak authorities so he had to attend grammar school again at Josefov from which he graduated in 1925.

[2] From 1922 Borkovský attended lecture on the prehistoric era at Charles University in Prague and from 1923 to 1926 was a volunteer scientific assistant at the State Archaeological Institute.

The discovery was not published at the time, as Guth controlled this aspect and was often late with his articles; the skeleton would however play a key part in Borkovský's later career.

[3] Borkovský carried out excavations on an early Slavic burial ground in Loreto Square in front of Prague's Czernin Palace in 1934–35.

[2] Nazi Germany occupied Czechoslovakia in the lead up to the Second World War and were keen to promote a narrative of an early Germanic and Nordic involvement in the region to legitimise their occupation.

Borkovský's findings about early Slavic settlement were unhelpful to the German cause and he was forced to withdraw his 1940 book under threat of being sent to a concentration camp.

[3][2] Borkovský was loaded onto a transport destined for a Siberian gulag but was saved at the last moment by the intervention of Jaroslav Böhm, director of the State Archaeological Institute.