A Brill Calendar: May 31

Hero of the Hunnebedden

Few civilizations put such a spell on scholarly historians like the one of the Roman Empire.

In its Decline - after the founding of a Second Rome, Constantinople - Western Christendom inherited much of its culture and learning, one that ruled Soul and Mind, State and Church. In comparison, the Greek roots of Classical Antiquity were much less well-known. Only a declining Ottoman Empire revealed the Parthenon's splendour, world-wide. Until the latter part of the 18th century, antiquities and buildings as desirable objects were by and large Roman, in both design and inspiration. Artefacts outside of the Roman model were hardly studied, let alone respected or conserved. The English antiquarian John Aubrey is in 1665 the first observer to ask attention for the megalith monument of Avebury, ‘excelling Stonehenge as a Cathedral a Parish Church’; a vast complex since the 14th century serving as a regional quarry.

In The Netherlands it is also seldom that ‘hunebedden’, stone burial chambers in the rural, thinly populated Drenthe Province, lacking fertile soil and a prosperous large city, attracted serious attention before the life & times of Albert Egges van Giffen (Noordhorn, Groningen, March 1884 – Zwolle, Overijssel May 31 1973). The interest of Van Giffen, graduated as Doctor in Biology at Groningen University, originated when he supervised removing a ‘terp’, a mound caused by centuries of human habitation on the same spot; the soil, rich in dung, being famous as a fertilizer and attractive as a commodity.

His job as Conservator at Leyden’s State Museum of Antiquities had made him familiar with archaeology, albeit along classical lines. In 1918 Van Geffen embarked privately on his first ‘hunebed’. Soon, Government charged the scholar with the task to make a comprehensive inventory; published between 1925 and 1927. Twenty years later he was appointed as the first Director of the State Service for Archaeological Soil Study. When he died, he was honoured – and occasionally feared because of his temper – as founding father of prehistoric archaeology, in The Netherlands as well as in Europe generally.