Scientific partners of the Kaiserpfalz Research Centre
The Kaiserpfalz Research Centre is involved in the academic discourse through various collaborations. The cooperation with the General Directorate for Cultural Heritage (GDKE) arose in 2009 from the desire of the Rhineland-Palatinate state authority to work together with the research centre as a specialist institution for research into the Middle Ages. In this context, the research centre supports, for example, the Directorate of Castles, Palaces and Antiquities of the GDKE (GDKE/BSA) and the Worms Cathedral excavations. Other projects include the Pfalzgrafenstein and Trifels castles, whose museum presentation was redesigned by the research centre on the occasion of the state exhibition The Emperors and the Pillars of their Power 2020.
Other important scientific partners of the Kaiserpfalz Research Centre are the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt, the former Volcanology, Archaeology and History of Technology (VAT) department of the Leibniz Centre for Archaeology and the Institute of Prehistory and Early History at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.
General Directorate for Cultural Heritage (GDKE)
Website of the General Directorate for Cultural Heritage (GDKE)
On 17 June 2024, Dr Heike Otto, Director General of the GDKE, and the Mayor of Ingelheim, Eveline Breyer, signed a new framework agreement on the joint research and preservation of cultural heritage. With this agreement, the very successful cooperation between the state’s Directorate-General for Cultural Heritage (GDKE) and the Kaiserpfalz Ingelheim Research Centre, which has been in place since 2009, has been continued and expanded in terms of content.
In the past, the research centre has developed innovative digital mediation services for various cultural monuments in Rhineland-Palatinate, e.g. for important monuments such as Trifels Castle or Pfalzgrafenstein near Kaub. In future, the projects of the two partner institutions will be even more comprehensive and multifaceted: With the new framework agreement, the joint ‘research of cultural monuments, cultural landscapes and archaeological finds from the Late Antiquity and Middle Ages’ was agreed.
The research centre in Worms is currently working for the GDKE’s State Archaeology Department. Since April 2021, the focus there has been on the synagogue district. In addition to the archaeological excavations in the area of the mikvah, a high medieval Jewish ritual bath, the focus has been on participating in a research colloquium to investigate structural damage to the monument and preparing reports for the ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) World Heritage Commission. In November 2023, the preliminary results were presented to a panel of experts. Based on the numerous datable findings in the synagogue district, an overall scientific evaluation is to be prepared in the coming years. At the beginning of April, the GDKE and the city of Ingelheim signed a separate agreement with the aim of continuing the archaeological and architectural-historical investigation of the mikvah and ‘to create the basis for the reconstruction of the construction history of the mikvah of a high medieval Jewish cult district for the mutual benefit of the GDKE and the research centre’, as the agreement states.
Research cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory
The research cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt am Main is coordinated by Prof Dr Caspar Ehlers at the mpilhlt. It originally emerged from the workshops of the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen in the research area German Royal Palaces, which has been based at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History since 2007, from which the MPI for Legal History and Legal Theory emerged in 2022.
Significant milestones in the collaboration were the founding of the Aachen – Ingelheim Palatinate Research Working Group with the City of Aachen and RWTH Aachen University in 2009, the conception of an exhibition with an accompanying book on the 1200th anniversary of Charlemagne’s death in Ingelheim am Rhein in 2014 and the multidisciplinary symposium “Legal Spaces – Historical and Archaeological Approaches” in Frankfurt am Main in 2015.
More recently, the concept for the exhibition “The Charismatic Place – Stations of Travelling Kings in the Middle Ages” (Ingelheim 2019) with accompanying publication and, in 2020, the anthology of essays “Medieval Palaces and the Emperors’ Travel Routes” with current research reports on seven palaces and imperial castles of the 9th – 14th centuries in the Rhine-Main region were created. Most recently, the first instalment of an edition of written sources on the Pfalz Ingelheim, which aims to be complete, was published in 2023.
At the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, the cooperation is based in the Department of Historical Normative Regimes in the research project Legal History and Archaeology. The ongoing central project “Landscape in the Laboratory” brings together a series of elaborate individual studies on medieval places of power within the Rhine-Neckar and Frankfurt/Rhine-Main metropolitan regions, which are being analysed in a multidisciplinary manner with regard to the construction of spaces.
Jurisdictions
Historical and archaeological approaches
(Studies in European Legal History 323)
Caspar Ehlers, Holger Grewe (eds.) Paperback, 336 pages with numerous colour illustrations.
€79,00
ISBN 978-3-465-04412-3
Further Co-operation partners
Leibniz Centre for Archaeology
Expertise in Volcanology, Archaeology and History of Technology (VAT)
In November 2018, the research centre and LEIZA signed a cooperation agreement in Ingelheim. The collaboration will focus on medieval material culture and economic history.
Centre Charlemagne
New City Museum Aachen
Project: Conference Early Medieval Rulers’ Seats and the North – Centres of Power between Diplomacy, Knowledge Transfer and Economy in November 2022
Historical Institute
RWTH Aachen University
Project: Conference Early Medieval Rulers’ Seats and the North – Centres of Power between Diplomacy, Knowledge Transfer and Economy in November 2022
Archäologisches Spessartprojekt
Department of Classical Archaeology
Darmstadt University of Technology
Project: Research into the fortifications of Ober-Ingelheim and Großwinternheim; virtual exhibition ortsbefestigung3punkt0
Institute for Pre- and Protohistoric Archaeology
JGU Mainz
Projects: Collaboration on geophysical prospections (e.g. Georgskapelle Heidesheim, 2020) and archaeological excavations (e.g. 2017-2020 “Am gebrannten Hof”, Ingelheim)
LEIZA – Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology
Project: Conference Early Medieval Rulers’ Seats and the North – Centres of Power between Diplomacy, Knowledge Transfer and Economy in November 2022