Felix Milleker’s Contributions to the Study of the Antiquities of Banat between the 1880’s and 1940’s

Abstract

This paper describes the contributions of the historian and archaeologist Felix Milleker (1858–1942) to the study of antiquities of his native Banat, in southern Pannonia, formely in Austria-Hungary. From the beginning of his scholary work in the 1880’s until the very end of his life, he published over 200 titles on the history, archaeology and ethnography of Banat. He was curator of the museums in Bela Crkva (1881–1883) and for a very long time in Vršac (1894–1942). In 1881 Milleker published his first work on Roman antiquities in the periodical Történelmi és Régészeti Értesitöin Temesvar. Until 1902 he continued publishing in this periodical dozens of papers on ancient history, archaeology, epigraphy and numismatics of given area including his studies on paleo-lingustics and paleo-ethnography. In addition to numerous articles he published the register of all sites from prehistoric times to the Migration period in three volumes with appendices Délmagyarország régiségleletei a honfoglalás előti idökböl (The Antiquarian Finds from Southern Hungary... I–III, Temesvar 1897–1906). In the second volume he registered all the known sites and described ancient monuments and finds of the Roman period in the territory of whole Banat: present – day western Serbian part, and eastern Romanian part. This corpus is of lasting value and still represents the starting point for modern researches of ancient history, archaeology and numismatics of given area. For his outstanding work Milleker received several prestigious awards as the “St. Savas of Serbia (Belgrade 1923) and medals of the Hungarian Numismatic Society (Budapest 1901) and the Deutsche Akademie (Munich 1934).