any standard and some good even by modern standards. However, given his aim of extensive excavation and the unaffordable amounts of (manual) labor required for that purpose, he could not have done better. Holwerda’s technical possibilities were not up to his theoretical insights. He never dug for curiosity’s sake or contingency alone; he always started off with a research question and set the feasibility of an excavation against the possibilities and the results to be obtained.

Holwerda had a lively interest in theoretical matters, he was much aware of developments in field techniques, he was a progressive museum director with a keen eye for the lay public, and importantly, he was never late in publishing his results. On the other hand, his obstinacy and his unwillingness to mend earlier opinions gradually isolated him from his contemporaries. His scientific inheritor, A.E. Remouchamps, died before he was able to write his thesis.

Albert Egges van Giffen (1884–1973) was a man of strong and lasting likes and dislikes. He had university training in botany and zoology and while still a graduate student (1908–1910), he was appointed to look after artifacts and bones being unearthed in ever-increasing quantities from terps. Some responsible people were becoming uneasy about the loss of old artifacts. Van Giffen did what he could, and in 1910 he was invited to join the RMO in Leiden because of his knowledge of terps. The museum recognized its responsibilities, but it lacked trained personnel—only Holwerda was considered a trained excavator, and he had other jobs to do. Van Giffen learned modern excavation techniques from Holwerda while taking part in the Arentsburg excavations as a volunteer.

Van Giffen took his degree at the University of Groningen and went to Leiden in 1912 where he was soon in conflict with Holwerda, accusing him of sloppiness because field drawings had to be “adapted” before publication. Holwerda in turn accused Van Giffen of withholding geological information. Van Giffen took this quarrel as far as the home secretary, and reports were written. In consequence, according to his biographer H.T. Waterbolk, Van Giffen had to abandon his hopes of ever becoming the director of the state museum. Fifty years later, at the end of his career, Van Giffen would still refer to his lost succession as the major disappointment of his life. Instead, a job in the Zoological Department at the University of Groningen was found for him, but he soon succeeded in founding an institute of his own, the BAI. When Holwerda retired in 1938, Van Giffen’s application to become the director of the RMO was turned down by the Department of Culture. Instead, Van Giffen became professor in prehistory and Germanic archaeology at Groningen and a professor of archaeology at the University of Amsterdam.

After World War II, he sought to centralize archaeological investigation into a single state service, and of course, that service was to be under his control and established in Groningen: “Above all the formation of the new service meant at long last a certain reparation for the wrong done to him as a young man in Leiden” (Sarfatij 1972, 77). He succeeded in the establishment of such a service (the ROB), but he did not succeed in the full centralization of everything archaeological in the Netherlands. From 1950 onward, Van Giffen became quite prickly toward deviating opinions. He left the ROB in 1950 after many quarrels, and in 1954, he retired from his professorships.

As lecturer and author Van Giffen was not exciting, yet in the field and in informal situations he could be interesting. He had many students, most notable among them his successor at Groningen, H.T. Waterbolk (1924); his successor at the University of Amsterdam, W. Glasbergen (1923–1979); and P.J.R. Modderman (1919) at Leiden University. Other students trained by him included P.V. van Stein Callenfels and W.J.A. Willems of the Archaeological Service of the Netherlands Indies. As an excavator. Van Giffen was brilliant, but he was not particularly good as a reporter, and the results of his most important excavation of the Ezinge terp have never been published—however, he is not alone in this respect.

The civil servant E.A. Kuipers is a curious figure in Dutch archaeology. Engaged in monument preservation on behalf of the government in the same years that Van Giffen and Holwerda