Worsaae and British Antiquities

Abstract

J J. A. Worsaae’s recorded words during his travels in the British Isles in 1846-7 indicate that he neither underestimated the significance of his visit, nor lacked confidence in the tenability of the ideas he expressed. His previous journeys in Norway, Sweden and Germany were a useful preparatory experience. Notwithstanding his youth and his high spirits, Worsaae must have appreciated his influential position as the exponent in Britain of ‘an entirely new enquiry into the history of the earliest state of the European nations, by means of the antiquities alone’. The discovery of ‘a stone period, in the history of Europe’ was, he declared, the first achievement and the vindication of the method.