repatriated to the Netherlands, it constitutes the core of the collection of the newly founded Royal Numismatic Cabinet in the Hague.

There have been more private and public collections of classical artifacts, and most of them have found their way to the RMO or to local museums. Some of the Dutch merchant dynasties amassed extensive private collections of ancient and contemporary art, which are still kept in their city palaces. Occasionally, such collections are put into public trust, most notably the collections of Allard Pierson and Lunsingh Scheurleer, which have been handed over to the archaeological museum of the University of Amsterdam (now the Allard Pierson Museum), and the important Van Beuningen collection of medieval pottery, which has been donated to the Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.

A few examples of the forgery and fraud that have existed throughout the history of archaeology in the Netherlands are in order. For instance, the reason for the collection of the sixteenth-century finds from the Brittenburg fortress was to construct a Roman pedigree for an aristocratic lineage, a fraudulent enterprise. In the 1840s, Janssen of the RMO excavated a “Neolithic” pit village near Hilversum, and it took a century for the finds to be recognized for what they were, nineteenth-century forgeries, perhaps by one of Janssen’s laborers. Famous among prehistoric fraud is Holwerda’s misidentification of late Bronze Age tree coffins as the wall blocks of wooden “dome graves,” based on a supposed analogy with Mycenaean tholoi (chamber tombs).

Several World War II finds that were later identified as probable forgeries by a Nazi bureau active in the Netherlands include “the Viking treasure” of Winsum (Elzinga 1975; Maarleveld and Pieper 1983). In the 1970s, news media ran stories about “the Vermaning hoax”—the Drenthe museum at Assen had for years been buying Paleolithic tools from the amateur archaeologist Tjerk Vermaning that were later recognized as forged. It was rumored that Vermaning was acting in good faith and that a conspiracy against official archaeology was behind the affair.

In the Netherlands—as elsewhere—interest in the archaeological record has never been very extensive. As Johan Picardt wrote (1660): “In the investigation of these antiquities of our home country, I do not find our compatriots very curious. They used to heed foreign, and external, more than indigenous histories. Yet I cannot understand or perceive that there are rarities or particularities in external histories, which we would not have, too, within our own country.” Indeed, both the general public and the government have been rather unconcerned. Only megalith graves have been protected since 1734, as a result of a provincial law to prevent their destruction during the construction of roads and dikes, and grave barrows, Celtic fields (late Bronze Age–early Iron Age field systems), and other early sites have been destroyed in agricultural reallotment schemes. The legacy of the Middle Ages—such as city houses and in places whole city quarters, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century city defenses, and even old windmills and dikes—have only recently been or are still threatened by city construction. Only the Monuments Act of 1961 provides a means to preserve selected parts of the archaeological record.

A Gallery of Dutch Archaeologists

Dutch names are mentioned in few of the overviews of archaeological history (for example, Hodder 1991; Trigger 1989), a reflection of the importance that Dutch archaeology has been accorded by the world. Nevertheless, from this local archaeology some names can be proposed as worthy of international stature, if only because of their impact, long after their death, on Dutch archaeology. Of particular importance are Caspar Reuvens, Jan Hendrik Holwerda, Albert Egges van Giffen, and Hendrik Beyen, but some lesser figures have played important roles as well.

Casper J.C. Reuvens (1793–1835) studied law and defended his dissertation at the University of Paris in 1813. A professor of classical art at the (now closed) college of Harderwijk, in 1818 he became the first director of the RMO and also the first professor of archaeology at Leiden University. His first excavations (1826–1834) were at Arentsburg near Voorburg on an estate bought by the government especially