The scientific potential of archaeological collections from regional and local museums in Lower Austria - The example of the City Museum Korneuburg

As the proverbial "memory of the region", regional and local museums in Lower Austria per-form a central function in preserving, transmitting, and researching the country´s cultural and natural heritage. As an essential part of the cultural heritage, numerous collections of artifacts from prehistory and early history can be found in such museums. Many of these objects were collected by motivated amateurs and local historians during the pre- and post-war decades, who subsequently donated their collections to various museums and universi-ties. Many of these collections are still not or only partially inventoried, even fewer are digit-ized or scientifically researched. The potential added value for the field of archaeology is thus completely unknown and unused for many of these collections. The project will concentrate on the archaeological collection of the City Museum Korneu-burg, which has largely been enriched by donations from collectors and local historians. Besides prehistoric finds from the immediate vicinity of Korneuburg, the museum also houses a considerable inventory of objects whose history of discovery at first glance ap-pears no longer traceable. The interdisciplinary dissertation project, which will combine ar-chaeological research with collection studies and history of science will be jointly conducted by the Center for Cultures and Technologies of Collecting at UWK and the City Museum Korneuburg. Besides a complete inventory of the archaeological objects from different peri-ods, digitization and documentation in the museum’s database, it aims to develop methods to reconstruct the origin and history of the objects in a comprehensible way. Furthermore, the dissertation will also critically examine the collection history of the museum in the larger context of archaeological research in the Korneuburg region and Lower Austria in general.