displayed (Klindt-Jensen 1975: 47). The relationship between both periods
is further explained when we note that in Scandinavia the Viking period is
included in the Iron Age. Thus Worsaae, who is usually described as a prehis-
torian, was also very interested in the Viking past and travelled to England
and Ireland in 1846–7 thanks to royal funding to study remains of Danish
(Viking) occupation in Britain (ibid.71; Briggs 2005: 9–13). In Sweden, where
the Romantic movement centred on the Gothic League, a society was set up
to revive Gothic ideals—‘Gothic’ meaning the late Iron Age in Scandinavia.
Prehistoric antiquities were also integrated into museum exhibitions usually
belonging to universities (Klindt-Jensen 1975: 61–2). The key issue that allowed
this easy acceptance of the prehistoric period was mainly related to the lack of
the Roman presence in Scandinavia, which allowed a relatively smooth transi-
tion from prehistory to the medieval period. Another area of Europe in which a
similar uninterrupted transition had taken place was in England’s geographical
periphery: Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The upsurge of Celticist interest started
around the 1760s, and foundations such as the Royal Irish Academy in 1785
have been linked to this (Cooney 1996: 152). Although only in Ireland does it
seem to have been connected to some national agenda (Champion 1996: 67;
Leersen 1996: 11–17), the religious schism between the medieval and the
prehistoric periods made diYcult—although not impossible (Hutchinson
1987: 85–6)—the integration of the most remote periods into the national
history.
Returning to Scandinavia, research into antiquities had a long tradition. As
seen in Chapter 2, in a political context of continuous tension between
Denmark and Sweden, seventeenth-century antiquarians had been sponsored
to research runic inscriptions and other archaeologicalWnds. This develop-
ment was partly halted for about a century due to economic and political
decline. Nevertheless, the eighteenth century was not a complete desert; the
learned academies founded from the 1740s onwards included the study of
antiquities among their activities. Some new legislation was passed and a few
cabinets of antiquities were opened to the public (Klindt-Jensen 1975: ch. 3).
The economic and social decline ended in the 1780s. The redistribution of
land radically transformed agriculture, creating wealth, and led to an exten-
sive transformation of the landscape and, consequently, to an ever-increasing
destruction of archaeological sites. In line with the liberal mood of the period,
in 1792 the archaeologist and theologian Frederik Mu ̈nter (1761–1830) pro-
posed the establishment of a
collection of all the Nordic monuments and prehistoric objects which were either
extant or on which there existed accurate and reliable reports—a task whose urgency
was enhanced by the destruction overtaking these monuments at the hands of
peasants, and through public works as well; since many ancient burial-mounds,
324 National Archaeology in Europe