the temple of King Menthuhotep II from the eleventh dynasty. Naville was the successor of earlier archaeologists such as heinrich schliemann, Mariette, and Gaston Maspero, who were interested in architectural ruins and large monuments, not in the smaller details or the kind of painstaking work of the younger generation of archaeologists in Egypt such as sir william matthew flinders petrie. Naville’s last excavation was at abydos in 1909, where he cleared the Osireion, which had been discovered by Petrie in 1902.

Naville was awarded many honors and distinctions from most European countries including his own, Switzerland, and he published many articles, reviews, and books on his work in Egypt.

Tim Murray

See also

Champollion, Jean-François; Egypt, Dynastic; French Archaeology in Egypt and the Middle East

References

Drower, M.S. 1995. Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology. 2d ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Nelson, Nels

(1875–1964)

Nels Nelson was a pioneering American archaeologist who was a great advocate and developer of new approaches to stratigraphic excavation. Taught by the great New World archaeologists max uhle and Alfred Kroeber, Nelson learned his craft excavating shell mounds on the California coast and participating in the excavation of Paleolithic cave sites in France and Spain. He undertook stratigraphic excavations in the southwestern United States after 1914, especially at San Cristobal Pueblo.

Tim Murray

See also

United States of America, Prehistoric Archaeology

References

Fitting, James E. 1973. The Development of North American Archaeology. University Park: Penn State University Press.

Willey, Gordon R., and Jeremy A. Sabloff. 1993. A History of American Archaeology. 3d ed. London: Thames and Hudson.

Netherlands

According to Dutch archaeological lore, archaeology became a scientific endeavor in the early years of the twentieth century when a young zoology graduate, albert egges van giffen, studied faunal remains unearthed during a study of terpen as indicators of prehistoric economies. Terpen (“terps”) are artificial mounds on the coastal wetlands of the Netherlands on which Iron Age and early medieval villages were built, and after the area was diked after a.d. 1000, they were exploited as sources of manure.

At the time, the only archaeological institution in the country was the State Museum of Antiquities in Leiden where the traditionalist Jan Hendrik Holwerda dominated Dutch archaeology. Inevitably, he and Van Giffen became enemies, and after some years of struggle, Holwerda and his museum faded away to be superseded by Van Giffen and the archaeological institute he had founded at the University of Groningen in the north of the country, right in the middle of terp-land. Because of Van Giffen, Dutch archaeology won international status, especially because of its meticulous excavation techniques, use of auxiliary sciences (botany, zoology, geology), and settlement excavations. Later, Van Giffen’s students ran archaeological institutes at every university in the country as well as staffing the State Archaeological Service. Today, almost all archaeological research in the Netherlands is directly or indirectly related to Van Giffen’s exploits.

In the late 1990s, that was still the majority view of the modernization of Dutch archaeology (e.g., Slofstra 1994), because when Van Giffen’s students became dominant in the late 1940s and early 1950s, their view of the discipline’s history became the founding myth of Dutch archaeology. However, the myth is mainly a repeat of Van Giffen’s arguments that he used in his attempt to bypass Holwerda between 1910 and 1915—a construct used in the battle for academic positions. Van Giffen and his students have retired or died now, so perhaps it is time to sketch a different picture.

Historians distinguish three periods of nation building in the Netherlands: the sixteenth and