Dr. Viola König was born in Duisburg in 1952. She had an early interest in archaeology and the ancient cultures of America, e.g. the Maya.
In 1971 she took up her studies in Freiburg, where she attended courses in Anthropology, Prehistory, Sociology and Paleoanthropology. Two years later she moved to Hamburg and eventually deepened her knowledge in Ancient American Studies. Due to her critic on the traditional way of teaching she diminished her effort in studying the Maya-Culture but found a growing interest in researches on the Oaxaca-region. In 1976 she did her first field research in Mexico; the collected linguistic data became the basic material for her graduation thesis which she finished in 1979.
In 1980 König took up an assistant position at the Ethnographic Museum in Hamburg which eventually became a full position. A year later König followed an offer of the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne, where she worked as a museum educator. In 1986 she became the head of the Ethnographical Section of the Landesmuseum in Hannover. She not only took care of the Ethnographic Collection and the conception of exhibitions but ongoingly did further research projects,e.g. in Canada. In 1992 she became the head chairman of the Überseemuseum in Bremen.
In 1997 König started to give academic lectures, mainly at the universities in Hamburg and Bremen, but also as a visiting professor in New Orleans. Since 2001 she is the head chairman of the Ethnographic Museum in Berlin and moreover holds a honorary chair at the Institute for Latin American Studies (Lateinamerika-Institut, LAI) in Berlin.
(photo source: http://www.fr-online.de/kultur/altamerikanistin-viola-koenig-was-die-agora-koennen-soll,1472786,11297446.html)
