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In 1848, the Danish Academy of Sciences established a multidisciplinary committeeto study shell middens, or kitchen middens, and geological and sea-level changes. Steenstrup, the geologist Forchammer, and the archaeologist jens jacob worsaae reexamined the shell banks. In 1850, they discovered the enormous shell bank at Melgaard and recovered numerous implements and bones from it. Although it was Worsaae who suggested that the enormous piles of shell represented the remains of meals eaten by Stone Age people over a long period, Steenstrup coined the name kitchen middens.
All three men studied and recorded over fifty shell banks habitation sites in Jutland and Zealand in Denmark and in Scania in sweden. In the early 1850s, they published six volumes of reports on these kitchen middens, demonstrating that they were of 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.
Steenstrup disagreed with Worsaae about the age of the middens, believing that they were Neolithic or Stone Age but that they were contemporaneous with the builders and occupants of the Megalithic tombs. Worsaae rightly believed them to be earlier. In lectures in 1857, Worsaae argued for a chronological division of the Stone Age into two periods; the shell bank kitchen middens were from the earlier period, and the Megalithic tomb period was later.
Steenstrup’s successful collaboration with Forchammer and Worsaae was the first of many successful collaborations between archaeologists, geologists, and biologists in Scandinavia and elsewhere. Steenstrup proved the importance of understanding the paleoenvironment to the study of archaeology, and his pioneering study of post-glacial flora was among the first of many significant contributions by biologists to archaeological chronology—with palynology, dendochronology, and carbon–14 dating reaching their apogee in the twentieth century.
See also
(1898–1967)
The Slovenian archaeologist and ancient historian Josip Klemenc graduated in archaeology in 1920 and in history and geography in 1921 from the University of Zagreb, Croatia. He received his Ph.D. in archaeology from the same university in 1929 for his thesis on the dislocation of the Roman Army in Pannonia in the first century a.d. Between 1922 and 1942, he worked in the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, where he became a curator. In 1946, Klemenc was appointed professor of classical archaeology and ancient history in the newly established Department of Archaeology at the University of Ljubljana, slovenia, which produced the first generation of Slovenian archaeologists after World War II.
Klemenc’s professional interests focused principally on the ancient topography, epigraphy, and numismatics of the Roman provinces of Noricum and Pannonia. In pre–World War II Yugoslavia, he initiated the study of archaeological topography, and between 1936 and 1939, he published three volumes of Archaeologische Karte von Jugoslawien: Blatt Ptuj (1936), Blatt Zagreb (1938), and Blatt Rogatec (1939), the first and the third with B. Saria. However his most influential work is associated with his discovery of Roman funerary art in Slovenia. In the Roman cemetery in Sempeter near Celje, the Roman colony of celeia, he discovered and studied sculptural remains that today represent the best examples of high-quality provincial art in Noricum.
References
Klemenc, J. 1972. Anticne grobnice v Sempetru [Ancient Aediculae in Sempeter]. Ljubljana.
Although the German archaeologist heinrich schliemann had sought permission from the Turkish authorities to excavate at Knossos in the 1880s, the site is inextricably linked with the career of sir arthur evans. Knossos lies in the north part of central Crete, quite close to the present coastline. Although settlement is thought to have begun around 6000 b.c., it is clear that the large palace structure that lies at the core of
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