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In 1848, the Danish Academy of Sciences established a multidisciplinary commission that included the zoologist japhetus steenstrup, the geologist Jörgen G. Forchammer, and Worsaae to study shell middens and geological and sea-level changes. In 1850, they discovered the enormous shell bank at Melgaard in Denmark and excavated numerous implements and bones from it. By the time they had finished the commission, they had studied and recorded over fifty more shell bank habitation sites in Jutland and Zealand in Denmark and in Scania in sweden. It was Worsaae who suggested that the enormous piles of shells represented the remains of meals eaten by Stone Age peoples over a very long period of time and that they were not the result of the action of the sea. In the early 1850s, the three published six volumes of reports on these kitchen middens, demonstrating their human origin and mapping patterns in accumulation. They also proved that the middens were occupied seasonally, and this fact, along with the distributions of hearths and artifacts, provided evidence of human behavior and activities at these sites.

Steenstrup disagreed with Worsaae about the age of the middens, believing that although they were from the Stone Age, they were the same age as the builders and occupants of the Megalithic tombs. Worsaae rightly believed them to be earlier. In his lectures in 1857, Worsaae argued for a chronological division of the Stone Age into two periods, believing the shell bank kitchen middens were from the earlier period and the Megalithic tomb period from the later. He published his observations in greater detail in A New Division of the Stone and Bronze Ages (1860), in which the find circumstances were the chronological starting point for observations about differences in types of materials. He argued that the early Stone Age comprised middens and rough implements of flint and bone and the later Stone Age comprised large stone monuments; stone chamber tombs and passage graves; and stone, bone, amber, and clay artifacts.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world caught up, and discoveries of cultural materials in the same stratigraphy (find context) as extinct animal fossils in English and French caves supported Worsaae’s hypotheses. He had met French archaeologist jacques boucher de perthes in 1847—in fact, it may have been that meeting that caused Worsaae to consider shell middens as earlier phases of the Stone Age. In 1861, Worsaae drew up another chronology for the Stone Age across Europe—with cave finds first and earliest, followed by kitchen middens and then by stone chamber tombs, which later became the accepted designations for the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic periods.

At the same time as his Stone Age work, the examination of numerous archaeological finds in barrows prompted Worsaae to hypothesize that the Bronze Age could be divided into two periods on the basis of burial customs. In a paper published in 1860, he suggested that cremation was used at the end of the Bronze Age because most cremated finds were found at the top of barrows while earlier and uncremated finds or inhumations were always at the bottom of the barrow. Worsaae was not the first to hypothesis about this division in the Bronze Age, but his detailed accounts of find contexts gave the idea scientific credibility. Based on comparisons in stratigraphy and although purely descriptive in nature, Worsaae’s divisions nevertheless demonstrated the possibilities of relative chronology, of dating according to the analysis of types of material, which was realized by the next generation of archaeologists. In 1865, in writing about the antiquities of Schleswig and southern Jutland, Worsaae went on to suggest a division of the Iron Age into three periods on the basis of coins (Byzantine and native) found in closed finds (undisturbed archaeological sites).

From 1874 to 1877, Worsaae was minister for Danish cultural affairs. He was also president of the International Archaeological Congresses at Copenhagen in 1869, Bologna in 1871, and Stockholm in 1874.

Tim Murray