Jørgen Troels-Smith, 60 år

Resumé

JØRGEN TROELS-SMITH · 60 YEARS

Basic to the great progress made in the field of Scandinavian Stone-Age research during the last generation has been the collaboration between archaeology and the natural sciences. Centrally placed, with one foot firmly planted in each of these camps, Jørgen Troels-Smith has been the main force behind this collaboration. He is the leader, and the founder, of the Danish National Museum's scientific department.

During his boyhood years on Samsø Troels-Smith quartered the island from his home in the Justice's House at Tranebjerg, collecting artefacts and investigating Stone-Age settlements, in particular along the coasts and on the islands of the cloven Stavns Fjord, whose outlines he has captured, with their subtle colouring, in many an oil-sketch.

Troels-Smith chose peat-geology as his speciality, and worked from 1938 as assistant on the Danish Geological Survey, later as head of department with the same survey, from 1944 combining the position with leadership of the National Museum's peat laboratory. Through his initiative the work for the National Museum gradually expanded to a degree where the formation in 1956 of a scientific department with Troels-Smith as head came as a natural consequence. It became the 8th department of the Museum, and soon embarked on new scientific projects, such as radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology.

Despite the press of work in the laboratory, an impressive quantity of scientific publications has come from Troels-Smith's pen, dealing both with peat-geology and with archaeology, while he has taken part in a long series of excavations abroad, most notably of Swiss pile-dwellings, where he has supplied the scientific background to the culture. In Greenland, too, he has worked on settlements both of Eskimos and of the Vikings.

In recent years Troels-Smith has turned his attention once more to his homeland, and at Hjortholm he is engaged in charting the course of the change-over from the hunting cultures of the early Stone Age to the farming communities of the later Stone Age. Noone here in Denmark has better qualifications for the successful completion of this exciting project than Troels-Smith, combining as he does the exactitude of the scientist with the intuitive grasp of the artist.

P. V. Glob