Czechs in History Ales Hrdlicka
In Czechs in History today we'll explore the life and work of Ales Hrdlicka, a world-famous anthropologist who settled in the United States but never forgot his native country.
Listen in RealAudioDr. Prokopec told me he visited the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, where most of Hrdlicka's findings were deposited, in 1992. He noticed that many human remains have been repatriated, given back to the Indian tribes to whom they originally belonged. Although dr. Prokopec saw it as a bitter end to Hrdlicka's labours, the loss has at least changed the old practice: at present, archeologists on Indian territories work together with teams of local people, who get the excavations back, after a thorough scientific analysis has been carried out.
Ales Hrdlicka
Hrdlicka never forgot about his native country - he visited Czechoslovakia several times. In 1930 he donated a million crowns to a newly established museum at the Anthropological Institute of Charles University in Prague, and also 100,000 crowns to help develop his former school in his native town of Humpolec. He died in 1943. Czechoslovakia was then occupied by Nazi Germany, whose 'race laws' went counter to Hrdlicka's conviction that peoples of the world were all of the same origin.