WORSAAE, JENS JACOB

(b. Vejle, Jutland, Denmark, 14 March 1821; d. Copenhagen, Denmark, 15 August 1885)

archaeology

Worsaae, the son of the county sheriff at Vejle, became an avid collector of antiquities while quite young. As a schoolboy he and a porter employed by a local merchant traveled the countryside, collecting pottery and bronzes and driving shafts into prehistoric barrows. By the time he entered school in Copenhagen, he was said to have the best and largest collection of antiquities from Jutland. In 1836, when he was only fifteen, Worsaae contacted Christian Jurgensen Thomsen, director of the Museum of Northern Antiquities, now the National Museum. Thomsen used him as an unpaid assistant; and soon Worsaae was cataloging artifacts, conducting groups through the museum, and helping Tomsen with his correspondence.

Worsaae was concerned with aspects of prehistoric archaeology that did not interest Thomsen, who was essentially a museum man. Worsaae was keenly interested in excavation. During the years 1836–1840 Worsaae spent his Sundays and half-holidays digging barrows north of Copenhagen; and in the vacations he did fieldwork and excavation in Jutland, where his parents paid two laborers to assist him. He drove broad trenches through the barrows and observed changes of structure and secondary burials; thus he became one of the first archaeologists to study and understand the stratigraphy of barrow construction. In 1840 Worsaae published an article on the grave mounds of Denmark, dividing them into those of the Stonen Age, the Bronzen Age, and the Iron Age. It was a revolutionary achievement, for he had taken Thomsen’s three-age system, originally devised as a museum classification; had applied it to antiquities found in the field; and had shown, in barrows and in peat bogs, that Thomsen’s theory of the three successive ages of the prehistoric past was supported by stratigraphy. This sequence was later demonstrated in the Swiss lake-dwellings. The Danish technological model of the past thus became a proven fact of prehistory.

In 1841, Christian VIII of Denmark gave Worsaae a travel grant to study antiquities in southern Sweden. The result was his book Danmakrs oldtid oplyst ved Oldsager og Gravhøje (1843), which was also published in German and was translated into English as The Primaeval Antiquities of England and Demark (1849) It is undoubtedly one of the half-dozen most important and influential books on archaeology publishwd in the nineteenth century. Worsaae then traveled in England, Ireland and Scotland, studying the national collections and lecturing to archaeologists on the Dansih three-age system

Upon returning to Denmark from his British tour, Worsaae was appointed to the specially created post of inspector of ancient monuments. In 1854 he was made professor of archaeology at the University of Copenhagen, and in 1865 he succeeded Thomsen as director of the National Museum, a post he held until his death. Worsaae traveled throughout Europe, attending international conferences and making and continuing friendships. He was both a representative of Scandinavian archaeology and one of the first pan-European archaeological travelers and scholars.

Worsaae recognized the truth and importance of the Danish three-age system stated by Thomsen, calling it “the first clear ray . . . shed across the Universal prehistoric gloom of the North and the World in general.” His contribution was to confirm the truth of the system through his excavations and his careful stratigraphical observations. Worsaae was interested not only in the archaeological record of the past but also in the interpretation of that record in terms of human history. For instance, he wondered whether the succession of Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages meant cultural evolution, or whether they were caused by the arrival of new pepole. In all his his writings he was keenly aware of the issue of independent invention versus diffusion, which became highly controversial during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Worsaae himself belived that the transition from Stone Age to Bronze Age must have meant the arrival in northern Europe of new pepole from southeastern Europe or the Near East; he argued however, that the change from Bronze Age to Iron Age could have been effected by trade and the movement of small groups without an invasion of new people.

Worsaae has often been described as the first full-time professional archaeologist. Johannes Brøndsted, a mid-twentieth-century director of the National Museum at Copenhagen, described him as “the actual founder of antiquarian research as an independent science,” A pioneer in excavation, interpretation, synthesis, and exposition, he was undoubtedly one of the great archaeologists of the nineteenth century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Klindt Jensen, A. History of Scandinavian Archaelogy (London, 1975), has a complete bibliography of Worsaae’s writings. See also G. Bibby, The Testmiony of the Spade (London, 1957); G. E. Daniel, A. Hundred Years of Archdeology (London, 1950); G. E. Daniel, The Idea of Prehistory (London, 1962); and G. E. Daniel. The Origins and Growth of Archaeology (London, 1967).

Glyn Daniel