with Germany archaeology was used as a political weapon. Worsaae denied German claims of ethnic and cultural affinities between South Jutland and Germany in his 1865 publication of Schleswig’s prehistoric monuments. So, too, did Sophus Müller when he wrote about South Jutland’s prehistory in 1913 and 1914. On the whole, the discussion of such nationalist themes has always thrived in times of national crisis or consolidation.

The great period of museum foundation occurred at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth (up to and including the 1930s). This was also a time of expansion for the folk high schools. The farmers and peasantry were the new dominant class. While they organized themselves politically and economically—forming the Venstre (Left) party, cooperative societies, banks, and so on—the folk high schools provided their cultural education. Farmers and peasants were taught a sense of cultural and historical identity by these schools, which spread and renewed fundamental national values, as reflected, for instance, in the high school songbooks. And as a result of this farmers and schoolteachers began to establish their own museums, the folk and regional museums. These institutions expressed the cultural self-assurance of farming people as keepers and intermediaries of the old vanishing peasant culture. They also reflected the desire for a more tangible historical identity based on the districts they lived in and knew well. As a further sign of this phenomenon, a large number of county historical journals were published beginning at the turn of the century. New social groups had become exponents of archaeological activity and of historical activity as a whole. For these people both history and prehistory had a definite function, giving perspective and meaning to their own roles in transmitting historical traditions. At the same time, it should be remembered that below the new class of independent farmers there still existed a large and uneducated rural proletariat, many members of which emigrated to the United States in the 1880s and 1890s. They did not receive their share of the progress until the smallholders’ legislation and social reforms of the twentieth century.

As the records of the National Museum demonstrate, teachers replaced the clergy as museum middlemen. In fact, schoolteachers played a major role in the archaeological and historical work of this period. In keeping with these developments, Müller saw archaeology as a product of the new era: as he observed, “Rather than tracing its ancestry to the Middle Ages, in the manner of aristocrats, the study of prehistory prefers to regard itself as a child of the new era, born as an ordinary citizen in the dawn of the Century of Liberty.”

The period between 1930 and 1950 was a time of consolidation, during which the cultural activities in the countryside were continued—for example, in youth and gymnastic clubs and in regional historical societies. A growing number of interested individuals, with affiliations to the tradition of regional history, became actively involved as amateur archaeologists and made their own collections, many of which became the nuclei of small, regional museums. These private collectors—many of them gardeners or working men and women—had a different background from their predecessors. Amateur archaeologists, the active collectors, became a new concept. This tendency toward a proliferation of archaeological interest has been accentuated since 1980. In the towns a new and large circle of educated, middle-class readers are reached primarily through the periodical Skalk but also through an increasing number of popular archaeological books, for which there is now a ready market. The readers are not actively involved in archaeology; rather, they see it as something exciting and interesting—as entertainment. This attitude is underlined by the way prehistory is presented: as “newspaper items” in Skalk, as prehistoric news in the form of sensational and exciting new finds, in the slightly piquant and macabre appeal of Glob’s book The Bog People, and so forth. Archaeology long ago abandoned its nationalistic commitment and has become entertainment for the rising middle classes. New types of exhibitions and museums also seek to attract this public. The national commitment to use archaeology has continued mainly among nonarchaeologists, most explicitly in the writings of Martin A. Hansen.