from the Iron Age that were found with them. In his early numismatic works on Roman coins found in Scandinavia, Hildebrand argued that the silver denarii must have been deposited before the third century a.d., and that the coins, like other Roman products, must have reached the north via direct or indirect trade with Roman territories and not by any other means. The grouping of the different flows of imported coins during the Iron Age became an important starting point for determining Iron Age chronology. Hildebrand completed a preliminary classification of the more important groups of coins, and went on to classify Scandinavian coin finds into four main detailed classes—the basis for later Swedish archaeologists’ development of a chronology for the Iron Age.

Tim Murray

See also

Evans, Sir John

Hildebrand, Hans

(1842–1913)

Archaeologist, numismatist, historian, museum curator, and director, and very much like his father, bror emil hildebrand, Hans Hildebrand graduated from the University of Uppsala in 1865 and received his doctorate in 1866. Hildebrand studied botany, geology, mineralogy, mathematics, and astronomy as well as the humanities at university, and was an early member of the Natural Science Society. He was also interested in geology and paleontology—contentious subjects in Europe at the time of his graduation. In 1862 he accompanied his father and the anthropologist Gustaf Retzius to London and visited henry christy, English banker and partner of the French archaeologist édouard lartet. The three Swedes examined the newest Paleolithic finds of Britain and france and borrowed literature on the subject from Christy. With his father Hans had visited Paris the year before, where they had no doubt heard the debates about jacques boucher de perthes’s stone tool finds at Abbeville. He returned to sweden with a strong interest in the earliest history of humanity.

Hans Hildebrand was introduced to numismatics at an early age by his father, and his doctoral thesis The Swedish People in Heathen Times (1866) was on Iron Age coins. He was unique in his knowledge of both numismatics and archaeological data from the field and in the museum context. Between 1865 and 1866 Hans and oscar montelius helped B. E. Hildebrand reorganize the Iron Age exhibition in the National Antiquities Museum in Stockholm.

Hans Hildebrand is known as the originator of archaeological “typology.” Unlike his colleague, the great Swedish typologist Oscar Montelius, Hildebrand was not interested in using typology to further chronological research and methodology. He was interested in the methodology of classifying prehistoric material culture. In his essay The Early Iron Age in Norrland (1869), Hildebrand used numerous typological descriptions of artifacts and proposed their dating via their find contexts. He also used analogies with other artifacts from coin and bog sites from other parts of Scandinavia to create a descriptive typology. In Towards a History of the Fibula (1871) Hans Hildebrand argued, on the basis of descriptive typology, that the Hallstatt and la tène complexes were two successive horizons at the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age in central and northern Europe. In 1874, as General Secretary of the International Archaeological Congress in Stockholm, he went on to suggest that both the Hallstatt and La Tène complexes were chronological and cultural concepts.

Like his father, Hildebrand was an advocate for the central and national collection of archaeological material in sweden, the subject of Scientific Archaeology, Its Task, Requirement and Rights (1873), written on his return from his second Grand European Tour. In this pamphlet Hildebrand introduced the term typology into archaeology and stressed the importance of central museums for the development of scientific archaeology and the typological method. Other European countries such as England, France, and, later, Germany did not have national collections, and Hildebrand understood that they were one of the main reasons that Sweden dominated and led the development of prehistoric archaeology during the nineteenth century.