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Download Download Proc Soc Antiq Scot 146 (2016), 1–6 OBITUARY : KLAVS RANDSBORG | 1 DOI: https://doi.org/10.9750/PSAS.146.0002 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 influential 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 specifically 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 Klavs Randsborg age 24 (1968), just after graduation from graduate of the 1960s with a restless desire to the University of Copenhagen see and learn about the world. This restlessness remained with him to the end. He had excavated Bronze Age chronology led Klavs to attend in Greece and Nubia (Sudan) with Scandinavian Colin Renfrew’s conference at Sheffield on teams before he graduated, but eschewed pan- The Explanation of Culture Change: Models European themes for his doctorate at Copenhagen in Prehistory in December 1971. Here he had in favour of Bronze Age chronology. Regularly a Damascene experience, as he recalled it. he returned to issues of chronology, inventively Renfrew had assembled European archaeologists renewing his relationship with the evolving to confront the ideas of the American processual revolution in dating archaeological levels that anthropological archaeologists. The clash of began in the later 1960s. Chronology, in Klavs’s cultures made a deep impact upon Klavs and led hands, provided historical narrative to the past, to his first major published essays – on ‘Social whether it was in deep prehistory or the 1st stratification in Early Bronze Age Denmark, a millennium ad. study in the regulation of cultural systems’ for 2 | SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES OF SCOTLAND, 2016 Praehistorische Zeitschrift, 1974, and ‘Social Ever since its publication in 1980, this book dimensions of Early Neolithic Denmark’ for has divided the field, but a modern generation Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 1975. ascribes its loss of archaeological innocence to At this time he completed his doctorate on this bold venture. Aged 35 when he completed ‘Period III and Period IV chronological studies the book, Klavs had discovered a new direction of the Bronze Age in southern Scandinavia and for his career. Although he would regularly return northern Germany’, and was appointed in 1971 to his comfort zone of Danish prehistory, this was to a junior position in his own department in always mediated by the lure of other narratives Copenhagen University. But in the aftermath that brought him equal pleasure. of the Sheffield conference the United States Following the publication of the Viking Age and its new ideas about culture process based in Denmark, Klavs embarked on a book to place upon quantified analysis beckoned. In 1975–6 the Vikings in their European 1st-millennium he spent a year as visiting professor at George context. Analysing mountains of Roman and Washington University, St Louis, with Patty Jo early medieval archaeological evidence from Watson, a leading exponent of the so-called New excavations and monuments west of the Crimea, Archaeology. While there, he excavated a cave in he compiled graphs which would elicit a mixture the Mississippi valley, travelled to almost every of admiration – and reproach. How was it that a US state and, most significantly, abandoned prehistorian was meddling with the Romans or his dedication to Bronze Age archaeology and the Middle Ages? Working from Copenhagen focused instead upon re-interpreting Viking Age and with fellowships at Amsterdam (1980–1) and Denmark, using the forensic tools of a supreme Frankfurt-am-Main (1989), his gargantuan and prehistorian. It was no coincidence that it was restless research took him in multiple different Colin Renfrew who commissioned Klavs to write directions. Subjects as diverse as traded Roman The Viking Age in Denmark: The Formation of glasses, burial patterns, consumption of animals, the State (1980) for his Duckworth series. winter markets at Birka (Sweden) and women’s I met Klavs at this time – now back at graves all served as means to the larger project. The Copenhagen University – as he toured the UK, results were again controversial but have created introducing his ideas on the Vikings to largely an enduring platform for an altered paradigm. In sceptical audiences. His demeanour was cautious January 1987 he organised a conference at the and thoughtful as he systematically explored an Danish Institute in Rome to bring Scandinavian analysis of Viking Age archaeology using models archaeologists together with Italian archaeologists based upon quantification drawn from archaeology and historians. The mixture was explosive and to tacitly rewrite the early history of Denmark. genuinely remarkable for parading the profound There was no pretence to his new narrative: it ignorance of many historians about the possible was efficacious use of the available settlement merits of archaeology, and equally the profound and economic data, graphically illustrated, and ignorance of European-scale evidence by most of crisply described within a historically sound the fortunate archaeologists present. It might be framework. I recall only my profound sense of an exaggeration to describe this as Klavs’s version boundless admiration, as though I had witnessed of Renfrew’s ground-breaking Sheffield 1971 some genuine miracle. Later, when his book conference, but it had two immediate outcomes. was published, he was damned by the doyen of First, Klavs edited the conference proceedings2 Viking studies, Sir David Wilson, in a review in speedily and followed it with his First Millennium The Times and damned in many other historical AD in Europe and the Mediterranean (1991) that periodicals. The damnation clearly pierced drew opprobrium from historians and admiration Klavs’s sensibilities, but he recognised that he from archaeologists. Second, Klavs embarked had truly discovered a new narrative to replace upon uniting the departments of prehistoric and the ‘vulgar histories’ of the (Viking) Other classical archaeology to bridge the divisions that were then the substance of Viking studies. which had created ghettos in Copenhagen OBITUARY : KLAVS RANDSBORG | 3 for generations. The latter struggle cost him rich prehistory of this large but understudied much emotional effort as colleagues belittled island, but on the rise of the four Greek cities his expansive pedagogical vision, yet won in the archaic period. Of course, there was an him promotion in 1990 to the status of ‘super echo from Denmark ringing in his ears as he professor’ in the university. contemplated connections to the late Bronze Perhaps it was this opprobrium that pricked Age in the southern Scandinavian regions, but Klavs into still further explorations, still in the his fieldwork had a coherence as never before. Mediterranean. With Alessandro Guidi (from Here he managed his research team and excited Rome) he united Scandinavian and Italian them with his intellectual vision, while also prehistorians to return after two decades to the delivering outstanding results, and achieving issues of Bronze Age chronology.3 If this was safe lasting friendships from admirers on the island. territory, his real gaze was on understanding the Winning honorary citizenship on Kephallénia Mediterranean in the 1st millennium bc, as much amounted to a new badge of honour, profoundly as anything to show the students of the new united more affecting to him than the many fellowships department the potential for modern analytical he had enjoyed as a scholar. Two major volumes research in the Mediterranean basin. Excavations were published on the Kephallénia fieldwork in Bulgaria and Ukraine, in the disorganised and its analysis and a third followed on the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, were Hjortspring boat.4 This latter volume essentially appetisers for a larger project that brought him experimented with his ideas about agency and profound satisfaction in the 1990s: Kephallénia. the military in the earlier Greek periods and their At the invitation of the Danish Institute impact far away on the Danish rim of classical in Athens and the ephor of the Ionian island Europe. No Danish classical archaeologist of Kephallénia, working with a group of his has published so extensively in a lifetime on Copenhagen students, Klavs focused not on the his or her Mediterranean fieldwork. Needless Billund, Jutland, July 2015, exploration of enigmatic post-built structures of The Single Grave Culture 4 | SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES OF SCOTLAND, 2016 to say, not every reviewer was impressed by country previously known for its slave-trading this vision and narrative drive,
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