On 21 June 2001, the ‘Commission for the Research of Collections of Archaeological Finds and Documents from North-Eastern Central Europe’ (KAFU) was founded in Berlin. According to its statutes, it is ‘a special commission at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in conjunction with the Romano-Germanic Commission of the German Archaeological Institute’ and currently has 26 members from Germany, Poland, Russia and Lithuania.
The political changes in the last decade of the 20th century created the conditions for the formation of the commission. They also opened up the possibility for prehistoric and early history research to address problems that previously could not even be officially addressed, let alone attempted to be solved. These include information about and the handling of archaeological collections from the former German territories east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, which are no longer in their original contexts as a result of the turmoil of the Second World War, the shifting of political borders, the extensive change of population and administrative changes. Some of them are kept in their original location, others have been destroyed or lost. If they still exist, many of them have fallen into oblivion at their storage locations, many of which are unknown to researchers, and thus appear to be lost to science. In this situation, German and Polish experts from museums and universities took the initiative in 1997 to set up a commission with the aim of cataloguing the aforementioned collections and making them accessible to researchers in the least bureaucratic way possible. This also laid the foundation for a research network which, following the enlargement of the EU and the associated open communication channels, should enable forward-looking scientific work on the basis of a common cultural heritage.