reached their peak and stabilized, coinciding with the consolidation of agriculture.

Whereas Worsaae had embraced decentralization and recommended that each county should have its own curator, Müller sought to concentrate all scientific and administrative control in the National Museum. The “old” provincial museums were placed under the administration of the National Museum in 1887, which also directed all excavations and was entitled to all the important finds. This led to the systematic looting of thousands of burial mounds in Jutland by dealers, and Müller began a ruthless, systematic fight against looting by means of proclamations, pamphlets, and popular meetings. With the spread of education and the gradual improvement of social conditions among the rural proletariat, itinerant dealers of looted goods slowly vanished from the scene.

The development of provincial museums in these years took a new direction in many places. Interest in peasant culture rose significantly over the whole of Scandinavia, coinciding with the growth of industrialization, and a large number of folk museums were established. Between 1855 and 1929 seventy-five local history museums were also founded.

New nature-conservation legislation was passed in 1937, which protected all prehistoric remains in situ. Between 1937 and 1957 all parishes in Denmark were inspected by staff from the National Museum. Undisturbed and particularly significant burial mounds and monuments (24,000 in total) were placed under complete protection, and all the 78,000 burial mounds that had been plowed were protected against excavation and destruction. All previous conservation had been voluntary, and thus 7,500 prehistoric sites were already protected when the new legislation was passed. Preservation initiatives had been started by the Commission for Antiquities in 1807, and between 1927 and 1934 nearly 100 sites a year were placed under protection. The new legislation, however, ensured a uniform legislative and administrative framework within which antiquities could be safeguarded as part of the natural and cultural landscape.

Equally important was the 1929 establishment of a lectureship in prehistoric archaeology at the University of Copenhagen. With Johannes Brøndsted as lecturer and, from 1941, as professor, a new generation of young archaeologists were trained there—individuals who would influence the development of Danish archaeology until the present day; the chair of archaeology established in Århus in 1949 guaranteeed scientific continuity. In 1932 and 1933 Brøndsted became curator of the first department of archaeology at the National Museum. A few years earlier, in 1928, the journal Fra Nationalmuseets Arbejdsmark was established to provide popular information on archaeology, and was published by the National Museum. Several new staff members were appointed, the first and most important of whom was Therkel Mathiassen, who laid the basis for a new tradition in the regional surveying of settlements and their environments.

There was a gradual but significant decline in the number of new grave and hoard finds brought to the museums during these years, partly because certain find groups were nearly exhausted and partly because of the conservation legislation; the growing interest in settlement finds may also have been relevant. A new type of active archaeologist arose as a result of the attention Mathiassen paid to this group of sites. The popularity of archaeology drew people into the field. During the same period Gudmund Hatt carried out his classic, pioneering work—the registration of Iron Age field systems and the excavation of their house sites. For the third time a research program was begun on an interdisciplinary basis, this one involving the Ertebølle culture and the development of early agriculture, but now, for the first time, interpretations were aided significantly by pollen analyses. The Mose (i.e., bog) Laboratory was set up during the war, and in 1956 the eighth department of the National Museum was established to deal with pollen analysis, C-14 dating, and similar matters. Among new sites investigated in this era were the large-scale excavations of Trelleborg and Fyrkat.

All these trends were followed and further developed during the 1960s and 1970s by a growing staff of archaeologists. This period was characterized by steadily improving methods of