around the country produced a paradigm for future investigations. Of those who followed Leland, the most influential was william camden (1551–1623), and his monumental work Britannia, published in1586, was the first general guide to the antiquities of a single country. Its subjects ranged from prehistoric stone circles (notably Stonehenge) to Roman ruins (such as the forts of “the Saxon shore”) to Saxon work preserved in later churches.

In Great Britain, Camden’s work was continued by diligent field antiquarians such as Robert Plot (1640–1696) and edward lhwyd (1660– 1708) in Wales and john aubrey (1626–1697) and william stukeley (1687–1765) in England. Elsewhere in northern Europe similar studies were being carried out by peripatetic scholars. In Denmark, ole worm, or Olaus Wormius (1588–1654), published several works on the antiquities of that country in which he sought to establish direct links between monuments and history. He was influential in the composition of a royal decree that was sent in 1626 to all Danish clergy requesting them to report on all the historical remains in their parishes. johan bure, or Johannes Bureus (1568–1652), spent much of his long life touring his native land of Sweden studying antiquities, in particular, runic inscriptions. Bure became the first holder of the post of royal antiquary. It was in Sweden that the first university chair of antiquities was created, at the University of Uppsala in 1662.

Elsewhere in Europe, similar studies were being undertaken by scholars who adopted the title of “antiquary.” In France, the major figure was the Benedictine priest bernard de montfaucon (1655–1741), whose initial paleographic and philological studies led him to the study of antiquities and culminated in his seminal book, L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures (1719). His work inspired other French antiquaries to begin the systematic survey of the historic landscape. In the last volume of his Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, et gauloises (1767), another major figure, Anne Claude Philippe de Turbières de Grimoard de Pestels de Lévis, comte de caylus, published detailed surveys of many prehistoric and Gallo-Roman field monuments in France.

In the eighteenth century, there were attempts by European scholars to analyze and classify the whole of nature and human life. The work of the encyclopedists and of Carolus Linnaeus (Carl von Linné, 1707–1778) had a profound influence on antiquarian studies, and the most significant impact was probably that exercised on christian jürgensen thomsen (1788–1865). When he was appointed the first curator of the Danish National Museum 1816, he was called upon to prepare some rational form of presentation for the many thousands of ancient artifacts in that heterogeneous “cabinet of curiosities,” and to do so, he derived the three-age system (Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages), which laid the foundations for modern prehistoric studies.

The Development of Legislation

In 1666, four years after Olof Verelius became the first professor of antiquities at Sweden’s Uppsala University, he was appointed royal antiquary. The first result of this appointment was the promulgation of a royal proclamation that declared all field monuments in the Swedish kingdom (which at that time included Finland) were the property of the crown, which undertook to protect and preserve them. The decree also imposed strict controls over all forms of intervention on such monuments. Three years later, a second royal proclamation extended this protection and control to all “portable” antiquities, which similarly became crown property. There are two interesting features in this pioneer legislation. First, while the ownership of monuments and artefacts was vested in the crown, their protection and preservation was in the name of the Swedish people, as part of their heritage. Second, antiquities were deemed to be protected even before they were discovered; thus, protection was accorded to them from the moment of their discovery.

It was another seventy years before another European state introduced similar heritage protection legislation. The discovery of the buried cities of herculaneum and pompeii led Charles IV, the Bourbon king of Naples, to assert in 1738 royal ownership of all buried materials and sites in his kingdom. This relatively simple