At the universities, the number of students started to increase rapidly in the 1950s with growing participation of middle-class groups after 1960. At first, that swell generated new academic jobs and ever more participation, but after 1970–1975, academic job opportunities tended to decrease, resulting in misemployment first and later substantial underemployment of later university trainees. The number of archaeological jobs closely followed suit, as did the number of academic and nonacademic archaeological institutes. Presently, heritage and rescue archaeology fare much better than academic archaeology in this respect.

An Institutional History

The State Museum of Antiquities in Leiden (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, hereafter RMO) was the first public archaeological institution in the Netherlands, and its foundation in 1818 marked a shift from traditional to positivist thinking about the past. The museum has been and is active as a collector of antiquities from the Old World and in fieldwork in the Netherlands and abroad. The first director of the RMO, Caspar J.C. Reuvens, was also appointed professor of archaeology at Leiden State University in 1818, but that appointment was not a recognition of the subject in the Netherlands. “[Archaeology is] not so much a distinct, useful science, as it is a pleasant pastime… when not useless, then not really necessary” as one obituary of Reuven put it after his untimely death in 1835 (Byvanck-Quaries van Ufford 1984).

By and large, that was the dominant attitude toward archaeology in the Netherlands until well into the twentieth century. Accordingly, the chair was left vacant until A.E.J. Holwerda (1845–1923) was appointed to the chair of Archaeology, Ancient History, and Greek Antiquities. Later, Holwerda also became director of the RMO (1903–1919), and from there, he revived contact with the university. In 1907, Holwerda founded the Oudheidkundige Mededelingen van het Rijksmuseum van Oudheden as an outlet for the publications of the museum’s investigations, but even then, there was no continuity, and Holwerda’s successor at the university was an ancient historian who had no use for archaeology except as an illustrator of early events. In 1922, Alexander Byvanck, who had studied with Holwerda, succeeded to this chair. Byvanck pushed the appointment of assistants whose major interests were in classical archaeology, and that subject rapidly became well entrenched at Leiden University. In 1921, archaeology had been legally acknowledged as a separate discipline, and only then could a degree in archaeology be obtained.

Meanwhile, at the University of Utrecht, two classical philologists had been lecturing on archaeology. One of them, G. van Hoom, also lectured at Groningen from 1919 onward, thus paving the way for a chair of classical archaeology at that university in 1951. C.W. Vollgraff, the other Utrecht philologist, excavated the acropolis of Argos from 1903 until 1930 in a joint project with the French Archaeological School at Athens. He also participated in excavations of the Roman core of the city of Utrecht led by Van Giffen between 1934 and 1938. One of Vollgraff’s students, H.G. Beyen, became the first professor of classical archaeology at the University of Groningen.

When Leiden University was reopened in 1945 after its forced closure by the Germans in 1941, a separate chair of classical archaeology was finally established, and it was held by Byvanck until 1954. There were good and varied relations with the chair of art history (which is still named Art History and Archaeology) at the same university, and contact with the material products of the ancient world was maintained through yearly student excursions to the Mediterranean’s monumental sites. Only when H.A. A.P. Geertman was appointed in 1979 did interest in fieldwork reemerge.

At the University of Groningen, Van Giffen founded the Biological Archaeological Institute (hereafter BAI) in 1920. He also became an active consultant of local antiquarian committees and exercised great influence in the archaeological field in the northern Netherlands. Van Giffen was appointed professor of prehistory and Germanic archaeology in 1939, and in the 1950s he convinced the Groningen physicist and