Denmark

Despite the fact that Denmark is richly endowed with human skeletal material, physical anthropology has never been a separate and independent discipline as in many other European countries and in the USA. Full-time positions have not existed until recently and the very few that are available today are rather ‘earmarked’ by theMedical Faculty. Nevertheless Denmark has a long history of scientific inquiry into the physical (biological) nature of the human condition, especially palaeopathology. The earliest anthropological study in Denmark was conducted by the anatomist Jacob

Winsløw (1669-1760), who in 1722 published an extremely precise description of an Eskimo skull found in Western Greenland (Winsløw 1722). The tradition of ‘craniology’ first appeared in the late part of the 19th century and into the first decades of the 20th, resulting in large catalogues of skulls, many of which included prehistoric samples, such as, for example, the publication Crania Groelandica (Fürst and Hansen 1915). At the beginning of the 20th century, however, a shift from mere ‘craniology’ to a more holistic

approach was introduced, and between 1906 and 1915 all of the available prehistoric Danish skeletal material was catalogued and described by Hans Andreas Nielsen (1850-1932) (Nielsen 1906, 1911, 1915). This work was continued by the physician Kurt Bröste (1902-54) and his co-workers, who made a detailed study of Stone and Bronze Age skeletal material (Bröste et al. 1956). A similar work devoted to the study of Iron Age skeletal material followed in 1984 and was conducted by the anthropologist Berit Jansen Sellevold (Sellevold et al. 1984). A group of Danish scientists have been particular interested in skeletal material fromGreenland. In 1949 the dentist Poul Overgaard Pedersen published his thesis on Eskimo dentition (Pedersen 1949) based on Greenlandic skeletal material. This was followed by a dissertation on ‘The Eskimo Skeleton’ by the physician and surgeon Jørgen Balslev Jørgensen (Jørgensen 1953), employing the traditional anthropometric procedures of the time. A colleague of Pedersen was the dental specialist Jens Jørgen Pindborg, who is probably best known for his book Pathology of the Dental Hard Tissue (Pindborg 1970). Also of interest from this period is the study by Ole Vagn Nielsen (1970) of Nubian skeletal material collected by workers during the Scandinavian expedition to the Sudan in 1963 (Bennike 1997). During the 20th century, the collection of skeletal material held in Denmark increased con-

siderably. Alongside the prehistoric remains already mentioned in the publications of Nielsen

(1906, 1911, 1915), Bröste et al. (1956) and Sellevold et al. (1984), new material was excavated and stored, and today a total of more than 20,000 human skeletons are housed in Denmark deriving from sites spanning a period of 10,000 years. With the exception of only a few collections, such as three leprosy cemeteries excavated by Møller-Christensen, most of the uncremated material is located either in Copenhagen (Panum Institute, University of Copenhagen) or in Odense (Institute of Forensic Medicine, University of Southern Denmark). The University of Southern Denmark houses only skeletal remains from the mediaeval time, whereas skeletons from all periods are stored at the University of Copenhagen. The skeletal material, however, is only deposited at the two locations and is legally owned by one of the 44 local Danish museums.