Michał Kobusiewicz was born on October 8, 1939, in Radomsko, in a family of landed gentry. His father Aleksander, a reserve officer (Second Lieutenant) in the Polish Army, was murdered in Katyń in 1940, and his mother Jadwiga brought her son up, alone working in agricultural services after the war. Since 1950 he has lived in Poznań, where he completed his primary education and then, in 1957, his secondary education in the Karol Marcinkowski Secondary School. In the same year he started studies at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, finishing in 1962 with a master's degree in archaeology on the basis of a dissertation titled Late Palaeolithic - Early Mesolithic site in Poznań-Starołąka, written under the supervision of Professor Wojciech Kocka, the then Director of the Archaeology Department of the Poznań University. He won his doctor's degree in 1968 at the same university, with the dissertation titled The Late Palaeolithic and the Mesolithic in Central-Western Greater Poland Lowland. His supervisor was Professor Waldemar Chmielewski of Warsaw University, and the reviewers were Professor Kazimierz Żurowski of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and Professor Zdzisław Rajewski of the State Archaeological Museum in Warsaw. In 1975, at the Institute of the History of Material Culture (now the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology) of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Michał Kobusiewicz got his post-doctoral degree (habilitation) in archaeology with the work Prehistory of North-Eastern Africa between the 16th and 5th millennium B.C. The reviewers of this work were Professor Janusz Kozłowski of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Professor Waldemar Chmielewski of Warsaw University, and Professor Romuald Schild of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. In 1992 President of the Republic of Poland, Lech Wałęsa appointed him a professor of humanities.
          Michał Kobusiewicz is an archaeologist also well familiar with the specificity of museum work. Already as a second year student, from February l, 1959, he started to work for the Archaeological Museum in Poznań, then under the directorship of Dr. Bogdan Kostrzewski. For many years, until his transfer to the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1965, he looked after the collections of the Stone Age artefacts stored in our museum. This offered him an excellent opportunity to get acquainted with the archaeological material of this time period. Of equal importance was his participation in the fieldwork carried out by Professor Stefan Krukowski from Warsaw at Palaeolithic and Mesolithic sites in central Poland, and in excavations in the Ojców caves (Krakow-Częstochowa Jura) carried out under the supervision of Stanisław Kowalski of the Krakow Archaeological Museum. At that time he mastered the method of excavation at these types of sites and shortly afterwards he was able to apply this experience in fieldwork carried out in the Lower Noteć River valley (along its section between Piła and Krzyż) together with the present writer. A scientific conference we organised in the Regional Museum of Trzcianka Lubuska in 1965 summed up the results of this research.
          On July l, 1965, Michał Kobusiewicz began working in the then Department of Greater Poland and Pomerania Archaeology of the Institute of the History of Materiał Culture, Polish Academy of Sciences in Poznań. Soon thereafter was to occur a major moment in the scientific development of the young archaeologist: at the beginning of 1967 he participated, for the first time, in the excavation on the Nile, in the Sudan, carried on by the Combined Prehistoric Expedition. The team, led by Professor Fred Wendorf of the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and Professor Romuald Schild of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, brings together prominent Stone Age specialists in this part of Africa, with American and Polish archaeologists playing the major role. From then on Professor Michał Kobusiewicz began to concentrate on the problems of the Late and Terminal Palaeolithic in the Sudan and Egypt. At this time he took part in field work on the Atbara and Middle (main) Nile in the Sudan as well as in the Fayum Oasis and Wadi Kubbanya in Egypt. This stage of his research into the Late and Terminal Palaeolithic in north-eastern Africa resulted in a post-doctoral thesis (habilitation). The participation in a long excavation season (1970) at the Middle Palaeolithic cave site of Nahr Ibrahim in the Lebanon, directed by Ralph Sołecki from the Columbia University, New York introduced Michał Kobusiewicz to the problems of the Middle Eastern prehistory.
          In 1982 Michał Kobusiewicz was appointed head of the Department of Greater Poland and Pomerania Archaeology of the Institute of the History of Material Culture, Polish Academy of Sciences in Poznań (now a Poznań Branch of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences). Yet new administrative duties did not impede the dynamic progress of his research activity. Over the last twenty years he has been conducting excavation in Greater Poland (extensive lands surrounding Poznań), in North-Eastern Africa and the United States of America. In Greater Poland, his discovery of a rich Terminal Palaeolithic settlement of groups of reindeer hunters and sites of a Paraneolithic character, are of particular importance. He continued his work with the Combined Prehistoric Expedition in Egypt's Western Desert, and in the Polish excavations at a Neolithic site in Kadero near Khartoum, directed by the author of this paper. In the latter project, executed by Poznań archaeologists and organized and financed by the Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology of the War-saw University and Poznań Archaeological Museum, Professor Kobusiewicz is responsible for the analysis of the lithic artefacts. His participation in the American excavations at the Pharaonic site at Kom el-Hisn in the Western Delta of the Nile and in the German excavation of a Predynastic cemetery in Minshat Abu Omar, in the Eastern Delta, was of comparable importance. In all these projects he was responsible both for exploration of a given portion of the site and for analyzing flint and stone artefacts. In 1999 Professor Michał Kobusiewicz carried out an archaeological reconnaissance in Botswana. The establishment of the Department for African Archaeology within the structure of the institution under his directorship will undoubtedly assist further development of African archaeological research, both in Poznań and within the Polish Academy of Sciences.
          Michał Kobusiewicz' contribution to the preparation and execution of a Polish-American project for comparative research into cultural development of the Stone Age hunter-gatherer communities in Central European Lowland and in the American Mid-West Prairies deserves a special mention. The partner of the Poznań institution is the Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa; heads of the project are Professor Michał Kobusiewicz and Professor John R. F. Bower of Ames University. This transatlantic research project, unique in the world, is still going on.
          Another field of Michał Kobusiewicz' activity is the supervision of archaeology students, who have already frequently taken part in the fieldwork in Greater Poland, Africa and North America. He has supervised three doctoral theses and was external reviewer of several doctoral and post-doctoral theses, as well as supervisor of numerous M.A. theses. During his employment in the Institute of Prehistory of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, he held lectures on the Stone Age archaeology of Central Europe, North-Eastern Africa and the Mediterranean zone. He is a member of several recognised scientific organisations, both at home and abroad. He has been a co-organizer of the six successful international symposia on the later prehistory of North-Eastern Africa that have been regularly held in Poznań since 1980. He has been a head of the Board of the Poznań Archaeological Museum for many years now.
          Professor Michał Kobusiewicz is a close friend of the Archaeological Museum in Poznań. On the 40th anniversary of his academic career, the Staff and Directorship of the Museum offer him their most sincere wishes for further scientific achievements and all prosperity.






FONTES ARCHAEOLOGICI POSNANIENSES 2001, t. 39, s. 5-8