Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte

The Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte once stood in the Bayenturm, a medieval riverside tower on the Rhine in Cologne’s Südstadt district. The city bought the site in 1881 after it escaped demolition, and between 1895 and 1898 the tower was restored under city architect Josef Stübben. Part of the old city wall and a Prussian bastion still stood beside the tower, showing layers of Cologne’s defence history. The building’s scars from a 1697 fire were repaired, giving it a solid base for its new purpose. In 1907 the tower became home to a municipal museum tracing regional life from the New Stone Age to the early Middle Ages. The collection grew from finds gathered by local excavators, especially Carl Rademacher, who had dug graves and settlements across the right-bank heathlands. The museum owed its creation to the Anthropological Society founded in 1903 by a group of Cologne citizens. They raised money for a library and a public exhibition space to spread knowledge of early human studies. Rademacher, the society’s driving force, opened the first displays in 1907 with artefacts from his own digs around Rath, Dellbrück and Dünnwald. Later he uncovered Neolithic village sites at Müngersdorf and Lindenthal, adding their pottery and tools to the growing collection. The city’s mayor, Wilhelm von Becker, backed the project and secured a dedicated budget. By 1927 Rademacher’s work won him an honorary doctorate from Cologne University, and Werner Buttler later discovered the Bandkeramik village in Lindenthal while serving as director. Inside the Bayenturm visitors found rooms arranged chronologically, from stone tools to early medieval brooches. The tower’s thick walls framed displays of grave goods, pottery shards and bone implements found in local burial mounds. Outside, the riverside path offered views of passing ships and the opposite bank’s modern skyline. The museum’s library held rare volumes on prehistoric research, open to scholars and interested residents. After war damage in 1943 only fragments survived, later forming part of today’s Römisch-Germanisches Museum.