Obituary: Klavs Randsborg

Abstract

Klavs Randsborg, who has died at the age of 72, was the most influential Scandinavian archaeologist of the post-war generation.

Full text

OBITUARY : KLAVS RANDSBORG
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Obituary
Klavs Randsborg
28 February 1944 – 13 November 2016
It is most certainly evident and thus free from doubt
that all things which are seen are temporal
and the things which are not seen are eternal 1
Klavs Randsborg, who has died at the age
of 72, was the most inuential Scandinavian
archaeologist of the post-war generation. In
a career spanning 50 years he excavated and
undertook research in Europe, North America,
and Africa. In many ways he was a humanist of
the old school, who paradoxically introduced
modern interpretive concepts to his students
at Copenhagen University, as well as to
international audiences through his immense
range of publications. But Klavs was more
than the sum of these parts: he thought like a
creative writer, curiously exploring new themes
and approaches specically for the purpose of
constructing new narratives about the past. The
romance of narrative was important to Klavs, and
each venture, small or large, was introduced with
a citation from a poet or historian.
Klavs Randsborg was a son of Copenhagen.
The city, its streets and especially its architecture
were in his bones. A student of prehistoric
archaeology with C J Becker, Klavs was a
graduate of the 1960s with a restless desire to
see and learn about the world. This restlessness
remained with him to the end. He had excavated
in Greece and Nubia (Sudan) with Scandinavian
teams before he graduated, but eschewed pan-
European themes for his doctorate at Copenhagen
in favour of Bronze Age chronology. Regularly
he returned to issues of chronology, inventively
renewing his relationship with the evolving
revolution in dating archaeological levels that
began in the later 1960s. Chronology, in Klavs’s
hands, provided historical narrative to the past,
whether it was in deep prehistory or the 1st
millennium ad.
Bronze Age chronology led Klavs to attend
Colin Renfrew’s conference at Shefeld on
The Explanation of Culture Change: Models
in Prehistory in December 1971. Here he had
a Damascene experience, as he recalled it.
Renfrew had assembled European archaeologists
to confront the ideas of the American processual
anthropological archaeologists. The clash of
cultures made a deep impact upon Klavs and led
to his rst major published essays – on ‘Social
stratication in Early Bronze Age Denmark, a
study in the regulation of cultural systems’ for
Klavs Randsborg age 24 (1968), just after graduation from
the University of Copenhagen
Proc Soc Antiq Scot 146 (2016), 1–6
DOI: https://doi.org/10.9750/PSAS.146.0002

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Praehistorische Zeitschrift, 1974, and ‘Social
dimensions of Early Neolithic Denmark’ for
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 1975.
At this time he completed his doctorate on
‘Period III and Period IV chronological studies
of the Bronze Age in southern Scandinavia and
northern Germany’, and was appointed in 1971
to a junior position in his own department in
Copenhagen University. But in the aftermath
of the Shefeld conference the United States
and its new ideas about culture process based
upon quantied analysis beckoned. In 1975–6
he spent a year as visiting professor at George
Washington University, St Louis, with Patty Jo
Watson, a leading exponent of the so-called New
Archaeology. While there, he excavated a cave in
the Mississippi valley, travelled to almost every
US state and, most signicantly, abandoned
his dedication to Bronze Age archaeology and
focused instead upon re-interpreting Viking Age
Denmark, using the forensic tools of a supreme
prehistorian. It was no coincidence that it was
Colin Renfrew who commissioned Klavs to write
The Viking Age in Denmark: The Formation of
the State (1980) for his Duckworth series.
I met Klavs at this time – now back at
Copenhagen University – as he toured the UK,
introducing his ideas on the Vikings to largely
sceptical audiences. His demeanour was cautious
and thoughtful as he systematically explored an
analysis of Viking Age archaeology using models
based upon quantication drawn from archaeology
to tacitly rewrite the early history of Denmark.
There was no pretence to his new narrative: it
was efcacious use of the available settlement
and economic data, graphically illustrated, and
crisply described within a historically sound
framework. I recall only my profound sense of
boundless admiration, as though I had witnessed
some genuine miracle. Later, when his book
was published, he was damned by the doyen of
Viking studies, Sir David Wilson, in a review in
The Times and damned in many other historical
periodicals. The damnation clearly pierced
Klavs’s sensibilities, but he recognised that he
had truly discovered a new narrative to replace
the ‘vulgar histories’ of the (Viking) Other
that were then the substance of Viking studies.
Ever since its publication in 1980, this book
has divided the eld, but a modern generation
ascribes its loss of archaeological innocence to
this bold venture. Aged 35 when he completed
the book, Klavs had discovered a new direction
for his career. Although he would regularly return
to his comfort zone of Danish prehistory, this was
always mediated by the lure of other narratives
that brought him equal pleasure.
Following the publication of the Viking Age
in Denmark, Klavs embarked on a book to place
the Vikings in their European 1st-millennium
context. Analysing mountains of Roman and
early medieval archaeological evidence from
excavations and monuments west of the Crimea,
he compiled graphs which would elicit a mixture
of admiration – and reproach. How was it that a
prehistorian was meddling with the Romans or
the Middle Ages? Working from Copenhagen
and with fellowships at Amsterdam (1980–1) and
Frankfurt-am-Main (1989), his gargantuan and
restless research took him in multiple different
directions. Subjects as diverse as traded Roman
glasses, burial patterns, consumption of animals,
winter markets at Birka (Sweden) and women’s
graves all served as means to the larger project. The
results were again controversial but have created
an enduring platform for an altered paradigm. In
January 1987 he organised a conference at the
Danish Institute in Rome to bring Scandinavian
archaeologists together with Italian archaeologists
and historians. The mixture was explosive and
genuinely remarkable for parading the profound
ignorance of many historians about the possible
merits of archaeology, and equally the profound
ignorance of European-scale evidence by most of
the fortunate archaeologists present. It might be
an exaggeration to describe this as Klavs’s version
of Renfrew’s ground-breaking Shefeld 1971
conference, but it had two immediate outcomes.
First, Klavs edited the conference proceedings2
speedily and followed it with his First Millennium
ad in Europe and the Mediterranean (1991) that
drew opprobrium from historians and admiration
from archaeologists. Second, Klavs embarked
upon uniting the departments of prehistoric and
classical archaeology to bridge the divisions
which had created ghettos in Copenhagen

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for generations. The latter struggle cost him
much emotional effort as colleagues belittled
his expansive pedagogical vision, yet won
him promotion in 1990 to the status of ‘super
professor’ in the university.
Perhaps it was this opprobrium that pricked
Klavs into still further explorations, still in the
Mediterranean. With Alessandro Guidi (from
Rome) he united Scandinavian and Italian
prehistorians to return after two decades to the
issues of Bronze Age chronology.3 If this was safe
territory, his real gaze was on understanding the
Mediterranean in the 1st millennium bc, as much
as anything to show the students of the new united
department the potential for modern analytical
research in the Mediterranean basin. Excavations
in Bulgaria and Ukraine, in the disorganised
aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, were
appetisers for a larger project that brought him
profound satisfaction in the 1990s: Kephallénia.
At the invitation of the Danish Institute
in Athens and the ephor of the Ionian island
of Kephallénia, working with a group of his
Copenhagen students, Klavs focused not on the
rich prehistory of this large but understudied
island, but on the rise of the four Greek cities
in the archaic period. Of course, there was an
echo from Denmark ringing in his ears as he
contemplated connections to the late Bronze
Age in the southern Scandinavian regions, but
his eldwork had a coherence as never before.
Here he managed his research team and excited
them with his intellectual vision, while also
delivering outstanding results, and achieving
lasting friendships from admirers on the island.
Winning honorary citizenship on Kephallénia
amounted to a new badge of honour, profoundly
more affecting to him than the many fellowships
he had enjoyed as a scholar. Two major volumes
were published on the Kephallénia eldwork
and its analysis and a third followed on the
Hjortspring boat.4 This latter volume essentially
experimented with his ideas about agency and
the military in the earlier Greek periods and their
impact far away on the Danish rim of classical
Europe. No Danish classical archaeologist
has published so extensively in a lifetime on
his or her Mediterranean eldwork. Needless
Billund, Jutland, July 2015, exploration of enigmatic post-built structures of The Single Grave Culture

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to say, not every reviewer was impressed by
this vision and narrative drive, but once again,
Klavs provided a profound and imaginative
archaeological vision of rich archaeological
material that had previously only been studied
on micro-scales.
Kephallénia released Klavs. In this period,
returning to his home in Copenhagen, he worked
on many national projects, but undoubtedly the
most important was his biography of the 16th-
century polymath, Ole Worm (1588–1654).5
Worm carried out precocious work on megaliths,
barrows and runes, and deduced that man might
have existed before Adam. In one of his most
exhaustive studies, Klavs showed how Worm,
through his writings and museums, shaped the
basis for modern prehistoric studies in northern
Europe. In his punctilious approach to Worm’s
life there was of course the admiration of someone
in his 50s searching for his own ancestor, and
seeking historical reason for the resistance he
continued to experience from his peers.
Like Worm, Klavs could not focus on one
subject alone, as his long list of publications
shows. A long excursus into the antiquarianism
of the architect Inigo Jones and King Christian
IV (the latter being one of his heroes) followed
in 2004. But by then he had found supreme
pleasure – perhaps the mythic place he had
always been seeking – when he was offered the
opportunity in the later 1990s to work in West
Africa. The Kephallénia experience had given
him the condence to be bolder as a leader and
eld director. With his study of Worm completed,
there were new frontiers beyond Europe – beyond
even his fascination with south-east European
archaeology and its chronological riches. Bénin
and northern Ghana beckoned. Here he was
to devote the remaining years of his life, re-
shaping the old department in Copenhagen as
the Centre for World Archaeology as opposed
to simply a department of prehistory and
classical archaeology. In doing this, he owed a
huge debt, as he readily acknowledged with a
certain contentment, to his partnership with Inga
Merkyte.
The greater part of Klavs’s research over
almost 20 years in Bénin was to provide
archaeological context for a small West African
country previously known for its slave-trading
kingdoms. It was a tabula rasa, much as
Graham Connah and Thurstan Shaw had found
in neighbouring Nigeria some 30 years earlier.
Supported rst by the Danish research funds and
then by numerous sponsors, partnering with the
Department of Cultural Heritage in the Ministry
of Culture, Klavs with Inga and a small cohort
of graduate students created a number of small
museums in Bénin. Their research ranged as
widely as Klavs’s intellect: from enquiries on
Middle Palaeolithic up until large-scale research
on huge Iron Age iron working sites, and the
ubiquitous and extraordinary underground
souterrains from the early modern period.6
Numerous sites were surveyed, many were
excavated, and with characteristic diligence,
publications both at an academic and popular
level followed. In some respects, Bénin, a small
and established French ex-colony, became an
African version of Denmark. Klavs found in
Africa an unalloyed humanity and satisfaction
that was absent in the fragmented archaeology
departments of northern Europe.
As an archaeologist, Klavs Randsborg was
remarkable for his creative and critical thinking.
His curriculum vitae embraces the range of many
normal lives, products of an intense capacity to
focus and countless nights spent writing in order
to complete deadlines set by himself. He had
an encyclopaedic knowledge, shaped endlessly
by his evolving narratives. Almost despite the
travel and research, Klavs proved himself from
1983 to be a dedicated editor of the Scandinavian
establishment archaeological periodical, Acta
Archaeologica, and a string of single-themed
supplementary volumes. Needless to say, its
personality altered, becoming a successful
vehicle based upon Klavs’s own interests.
Klavs will be remembered as a gentle, if
provocative teacher and most of all for being
generous with his time and friendship. Cohorts
of students from Copenhagen enjoyed his
archaeological tours of regions of Europe,
from Ireland and Scotland to parts of eastern
Europe. Cohorts of students, too, found him far
more approachable than the initial impression
of this taciturn, bear-like, slightly deaf man. His
manner, especially in later years, was shaped

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by a deep awareness of how fortunate he was
to change career at 35 and to escape the
conning bounds of Danish prehistory, and to
roam the past across continents. And yet he
never deserted his homeland. A brief spell in
the University of Goteborg revealed how much
intellectually and culturally he owed to Denmark.
So, it is perhaps appropriate that his last books
include The Anatomy of Denmark: Archaeology
and History from the Ice Age to the Present (2009)
and Roman Reections: Iron Age to Viking Age
in Northern Europe (2015). Each book bears the
hallmark of the perpetual excitement he found in
his own past and his deep commitment to sharing
this excitement as widely as possible. Only a
handful of European archaeologists since the time
of Ole Worm have left such a legacy.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to Inga Merkyte for her precious help
in writing this memoir, and John Moreland for his
thoughtful comments.
NOTES
1 Anglo-Saxon charter ad 770, cited by Klavs
Randsborg, The Viking Age in Denmark: The
Formation of the State (1980), viii.
2 The Birth of Europe: Archaeology and Social
Development in the First Millennium (1989).
3 Absolute Chronology: Archaeological Europe
2500–500 bc (1996).
4 Hjortspring: Warfare and Sacrice in early
Europe (1995).
5 Ole Worm: An Essay on the Modernization of
Antiquity, Acta Archaeologica 65 (1994), 135–
69.
6 With Inga Merkyte, Bénin Archaeology: the
Ancient Kingdoms (2009).
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
1967 ‘“Aegean” Bronzes in a Grave in Jutland’,
Acta Archaeologica XXXVIII: 1–27.
1968 ‘Von Period II zu III, Chronologische Studien
über die ältere Bronzezeit Südskandinaviens
und Norddeutschlands’, Acta Archaeologica
XXXIX: 1–142.
1970 ‘Eine kupferne Schmuckscheibe aus einem
Dolmen in Jütland’, Acta Archaeologica
XLI: 181–90.
1972 From Period III to Period IV, Chronological
Studies of the Bronze Age in Southern
Scandinavia and Northern Germany.
Publications of the National Museum,
Archaeological-Historical Series I, Vol XV.
Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark.
1974 ‘Social Stratication in Early Bronze
Age Denmark: A Study in the Regulation
of Cultural Systems’, Praehistorische
Zeitschrift 49: 38–61.
1975 ‘Social Dimensions of Early Neolithic
Denmark’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric
Society 41: 105–18.
1979 ‘Resource Distribution and the Function
of Copper in Early Neolithic Denmark’, in
M Ryan (ed.) The Origins of Metallurgy in
Atlantic Europe, 303–18. Dublin: Dublin
Stationery Ofce.
1980 The Viking Age in Denmark: The Formation
of a State. London & New York: Duckworth.
1981 ‘Les activités internationales des Vikings:
raids ou commerce?’, Annales. Économies,
Sociétés, Civilisations 36: 862–8.
1981 (ed. with R Chapman and I Kinnes)
The Archaeology of Death. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
1984 (with C Nybo) ‘The Cofn and the Sun.
Demography and Ideology in Scandinavian
Prehistory’, Acta Archaeologica 55: 161–84.
1984 ‘Women in Prehistory: The Danish
Example’, Acta Archaeologica 55: 143–54.
1985 ‘Subsistence and Settlement on Northern
Temperate Europe in the First Millennium
AD’, in Barker, G & Gamble, C (eds) Beyond
Domestication in Prehistoric Europe.
Investigations in Subsistence Archaeology
and Social Complexity, 233–65. London:
Academic Press.
1985 (with S van Lith) ‘Roman Glass in the West:
A Social Study’, Berichten van de Rijksdienst
voor het Oudheidkundig Bodemonderzoek
35: 413–532.
1989 (ed.) The Birth of Europe. Archaeology and
Social Development in the First Millennium
ad. Analecta Romana Instituti Danici.
Supplementum XVI.

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1990 ‘Seafaring and Society – in South
Scandinavian and European Perspective’, in
Crumlin-Pedersen, O et al (eds) Aspects of
Maritime Scandinavia AD 200–1200, 11–
22. Roskilde: Viking Ship Museum.
1991 The First Millennium ad in Europe and the
Mediterranean: An Archaeological Essay.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1991 ‘Historical Implications: Chronological
Studies in European Archaeology 2000–500
bc’, Acta Archaeologica 62: 89–108.
1991 ‘Gallemose. A Chariot from the Early
Second Millennium bc in Denmark?’, Acta
Archaeologica 62: 109–22.
1992 ‘Barbarians, Classical Antiquity and the
Rise of Western Europe’, Past and Present
137: 8–24.
1992 Archaeology and the Man-Made Material
Reality. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.
1992 ‘Antiquity and Archaeology in “Bourgeois”
Scandinavia 1750–1800’, Acta Archaeo-
logica 63: 209–33.
1993 ‘Kivik: Archaeology and Iconography’,
Acta Archaeologica Supplementa 64(1):
1–147.
1994 ‘The Archaeology of Gudme and
Lundeborg’, in Nielson, P O, Randsborg, K
& Thrane, H (eds) Proceedings of the
International Symposium in Svendborg
1991, 144–61. Arkæologiske Studier Vol X.
Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.
1994 ‘Ole Worm: An Essay on the Modernization
of Antiquity’, Acta Archaeologica 65: 135–
69.
1994 ‘A Greek Episode: The Early Hellenistic
Settlement on Western Crimea’, Acta
Archaeologica 65: 171–96.
1995 Hjortspring: Warfare and Sacrice in Early
Europe. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.
1996 (ed.) Absolute Chronology: Archaeological
Europe 2500–500 bc, Acta Archaeologica
Supplementa I.
1998 ‘Plundered Bronze Age Graves. Archaeology
& Social Implications’, Acta Archaeologica
69: 113–38.
1998 ‘Subterranean Structures. Archaeology in
Bénin, West Africa’, Acta Archaeologica
69: 209–27.
2000 (ed. with S Stummann Hansen) Vikings in
the West, Acta Archaeologica Supplementa
II.
2002 Kephallénia. Archaeology and History. The
Ancient Greek Cities, Acta Archaeologica
Supplementa IV: 1–2.
2003 ‘Bastrup – Europe. A massive Danish
Donjon from 1100’, Acta Archaeologica 74:
65–122.
2004 ‘Approaches to the Greenlanders’,
Archaeologia Islandica 3: 9–19.
2004 Inigo Jones & Christian IV. Archaeological
Encounters in Architecture, Acta Archaeo-
logica Supplementa V.
2006 ‘Opening the Bronze Age Oak-Cofn
Grave. New Dates – New Perspectives’, in
Randsborg, K & Christensen, K (eds) Bronze
Age Oak-Cofn Graves. Archaeology &
Dendro-Dating, Acta Archaeologica
Supplementa VII: 1–162.
2007 Richard Hodges (ed.) Stone Age Studies in
Post-Glacial Europe, Acta Archaeologica
Supplementa IX.
2008 ‘Kings’ Jelling: Gorm & Thyra’s Palace.
Harald’s Monument & Grave – Svend’s
Cathedral’, Acta Archaeologica 79: 1–23.
2009 Anatomy of Denmark. Archaeology &
History: Ice Age to ad 2000. London:
Bloomsbury.
2009 (with I Merkyte) ‘Graves from Dahomey:
Beliefs, Ritual and Society in Ancient
Bénin’, Journal of African Archaeology 7:
55–77.
2009 (with I Merkyte) ‘Bénin Archaeology: The
Ancient Kingdoms’, Acta Archaeologica
80(1–2).
2010 ‘Bronze Age Chariots. From Wheels &
Yoke to Bridles, Goad & Double-arm
Knob’, Acta Archaeologica 81: 251–69.
2011 Bronze Age Textiles. Men, Women, and
Wealth. London: Bloomsbury.
2012 (with I Merkyte) ‘Danish Castles, Forts and
Plantations in Ghana’, Acta Archaeologica
83: 317–42.
2015 Roman Reections: Iron Age to Viking
Age in Northern Europe. London:
Bloomsbury.
Richard Hodges