This project focuses on the subsistence strategies of Early Neolithic communities that inhabited the upland region of South Bohemia. Its results reveal a distinctive trajectory for this peripheral area that was colonised significantly later, brought incoming farmers into close contact with hunter-gatherers and made them adapt their conservative farming practices.

The Habsburg Mausoleum in St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague, designed and constructed in the second half of the sixteenth century by Alexander Colin from Mecheln in the Low Countries, is often noted in modern scholarship as an early manifestation of the influence in Bohemia of the Habsburg dynasty, which had ascended the Bohemian throne in 1527 and ruled without interruption until 1918. Bridging both art historical and social cultural scholarship, this article explores the location and spatial features of the mausoleum, as well as its reception by contemporaries. It argues that while the style and size of the mausoleum is modest, its central location changed the dynastic symbolism in the cathedral, placing the Habsburgs at its center. And while it is less visible than other Habsburg cultural projects of its day, it—more than any single cultural project of the early Habsburg dynasty—demonstrates and symbolizes Habsburg ambitions in and commitment to Bohemia and is an important element in both the transformation of Prague into a Habsburg residential city and in long-term Catholic renewal efforts.

In 1577, a petty pawnbroker named Ester lost a clasp belonging to a Prague noblewoman, Lady Juliana the Fifth. Having been traded repeatedly between anonymous pawnbrokers, the clasp was eventually tracked down in the Polish city of Poznań, by which time Ester had already fled Prague and taken refuge in Cracow. In this essay, I use the subsequent criminal court case to explore this illuminating episode in the history of the city's Jewish Quarter. Taking place in the late Renaissance, during what has often been referred to as the Jewish “Golden Age,” I argue that this dramatic event provides access to the realities of an era often characterized as harmonious. I position pawnbroking as an industry that invited intimate and regular cross-confessional contact, and one that therefore offers up new opportunities to consider the nature of coexistence. By following the movement of both Ester and the pawned clasp from Prague to Poland, I also show how attention to pawnbroking can illuminate a constellation of transregional connections that stretched from Bohemia to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to its east, revealing the otherwise unrecorded ways in which Prague's Jews were connected to the Ashkenazi diaspora.

The histories of early modern religion and trade have both benefited from the global turn in recent years. This article brings the two fields together through the study of religious objects in Prague in the seventeenth century and shows ways in which religion and religious practice were entangled with new commercial and artistic ventures that crossed regional and international borders. Among the possessions of seventeenth-century Prague burghers were religious objects that had come from exotic lands, such as a “coconut” rosary and a ruby and diamond “pelican in her piety” jewel. These objects were made in multiple locations and traded to satisfy a new demand for items that could aid and display devotion as well as act as markers of wealth and confessional identity. Through this study of religious objects, Central Europe is revealed to be an important locale to the global history of the early modern period.

This article was first conceived as a commemorative address for the centenary of the extinction of the Habsburg monarchy, which occurred in November 1918. It seeks to take a correspondingly broad view, geographically and chronologically, of the factors that occasioned that collapse. It addresses three main themes, structured loosely around three classic historiographical analyses of the monarchy as a whole. The great irony of the last phase of Habsburg rule in Central Europe is that it was undermined by precisely those elements in the politics and society of the region that seemed, on the face of things, to derive most advantage from it. The article concentrates on the long-term dysfunctionality caused by the evolution of the Hungarian and German problems, and by the progressive enfeeblement of dynastic institutions. It also engages more briefly with a countervailing phenomenon, that some of those interests most conspicuously spurned by central government might have been the readiest to rescue it. On the argument presented here, World War I, which finally brought the monarchy low, was a catalyst rather than an independent determiner of that outcome.

Liberal political changes in the Habsburg monarchy during the 1860s and 1870s, especially those caused by the December Constitution of 1867 and the ensuing schooling laws, created the necessary legal framework for German and Czech school associations to establish national monolingual schools in Bohemia—the so-called minority schools. These local organizations, however, were soon superseded by central school associations, namely the German association in Vienna (Deutscher Schulverein) and the Czech one in Prague (Ústřední Matice Školská). Founded in 1880, these associations were aimed at schools in the linguistically, and therefore nationally, contested regions along the “language frontier.” This study focuses on the dynamics of the national contestation over schooling prior to World War I and compares the activities of these two associations against the background of political democratization, mass mobilization, and the social questions of the fin de siècle. The comparative analysis of the proclamations, activities, and political contacts of the competing central school associations aims at revising theses about the position and meaning of these organizations and shows their very close interdependence upon political processes, especially on the unsuccessful Czech-German negotiations on a national compromise for Bohemia.

Widespread violence and military conflicts dominate many historical accounts of the Early Middle Ages in Europe, but archaeological evidence to corroborate such a picture has hitherto been scarce. Analysis of human remains from the Bohemian stronghold of Budeč offers a unique insight into one such event: a wave of violence that probably followed the removal of Duke Wenceslas from power by his brother Boleslav I in AD 935. A mass grave near the hillfort holds mainly male burials that show numerous injuries sustained from sword blows, testifying to the human cost of this disturbance and demonstrating the structure and reality of early medieval violence.

A revision of the Lower Devonian dalmanitid trilobites of the Prague Basin (Czech Republic) is presented. The subfamily Odontochilinae Šnajdr is considered a synonym of Dalmanitidae Vogdes. Twenty-one previously and five newly described (three in open nomenclature) species and subspecies occur in the Prague Basin from the lowermost Pragian (one problematic specimen possibly comes from the uppermost Lochkovian) to the Lower Emsian; the last questionable record is from the Upper Emsian. The species have been assigned to four genera and subgenera: Odontochile Hawle & Corda, Reussiana Šnajdr, Zlichovaspis (Zlichovaspis) Přibyl & Vaněk and Zlichovaspis (Devonodontochile) Šnajdr. These trilobites are considered as scavengers or opportunistic predators, living most of their lives as vagrant benthos burying in the muddy substrate to find organic remains. The first undoubted adult-like meraspid specimens are described.

New radiocarbon dates from four Moravian and Bohemian sites are presented and linked to previous work on the depositional contexts of human fossils at similar sites in the region. Whilst dates from Mladeč confirm its early Upper Palaeolithic age, the chronologies of the other three sites require revision.

This present revision of Bohemian Ordovician illaenid trilobites of the Prague Basin (Czech Republic) follows the recent evaluation of their systematic position. This revision contains redescriptions and illustrations of the type species of several illaenid genera, the most up-to-date references for those genera, and an assessment of their variability and also of the palaeobiogeographic distribution of some illaenid genera. Bohemian illaenids in several cases include the type species of globally distributed taxa, whose distinction has often been uncertain and controversial. The validity of the genera Zbirovia Šnajdr, 1956 and Zdicella Šnajdr, 1956 is discussed and confirmed. The genus Alceste Hawle et Corda, 1847 stays in open nomenclature. In Ectillaenus katzeri katzeri (Barrande, 1856) allometric growth is described and Vysocania Vaněk & Vokáč, 1997 is considered to be a junior synonym of Stenopareia Holm, 1886.