Georg and Vera Leisner
Georg and Vera Leisner were married German prehistorians and archaeologists who, after becoming a Lt Colonel and a nurse, spent many years studying fourth and third millennia BCE megalithic sites in Iberia.
They produced numerous publications on this topic, almost all published jointly, which remain the classic reference works on the Portuguese and Spanish megalithic.
They developed a systematic method of research based on direct observation, drawings and photographs, coupled with the discussion of available sources.
In 1900 and 1901 he took part in the campaigns that followed the Boxer Rebellion in China and in 1904 and 1905 was involved in the "war" against the Herero people in German South West Africa, now Namibia.
[5] Returning to Bavaria after the trip to Italy, the couple made acquaintance with Hugo Obermaier, a distinguished prehistorian and anthropologist and professor at the Complutense University of Madrid.
However, he soon moved to the Department of Prehistory and Early History at the University of Marburg, where the first German chair of prehistoric archaeology was created in 1928.
[1][6] They travelled together to northwest Spain, where they worked in partnership with the local archaeologist Carlos Cerdán Márquez [es], and Portugal for seven months in 1929–30 to carry out the research, Vera doing drawings of the graves and also learning photography.
In 1928, at the age of 62, Georg earned his doctorate on megalithic tombs in the Spanish region of Galicia, under the supervision of Gero von Merhart.
Vera's lack of a doctorate and the fact that, at the time, archaeology was a male-dominated discipline, may explain why, in later life, Georg was very concerned to secure her rights to their work after his death.
While they received advice and moral support from Hugo Obermaier, who at the time was living in Madrid, and from Gero von Merhart at the University of Marburg, only the second and third journeys to Spain were funded by the forerunner of the German Research Foundation (DFG).
With limited resources they had to rely on their network of contacts to provide local connections and logistical support and accommodation for the numerous journeys made by train, bus, car, horse wagon, donkey, mule, bicycle or on foot.
It covered the Spanish provinces of Guadalajara, Teruel, Valencia, Murcia, Almeria, Granada, Malaga, Cordoba, Seville, Cadiz and Huelva as well as the Portuguese region of the Algarve.
Its impact was initially limited due to the fact that it was in German, there were distribution constraints and many copies were lost at the end of the war.
They were in Portugal when they learned that their Munich apartment had been destroyed by an Allied bombing raid, with the loss of important documents and research material.
This led to a grant to the Leisners from the German Research Foundation (DFG), which enabled them to disseminate their findings in Spanish and Portuguese and to publish the second volume of their work on megalithic tombs in Iberia in 1959.
They were in regular correspondence with leading archaeologists, including the Australian, V. Gordon Childe, who recognised, in particular, their work on the Bell Beaker Culture.
[3] With support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation the items were listed, catalogued, indexed, treated and scanned in 2012–13 to make them available for web dissemination.
