Introduction

It all began in 1807, when the British army bombarded and burned down much of Copenhagen. Denmark found itself in the midst of one of the devastating wars of the Napoleonic period. This period also witnessed another sort of destruction. In the wake of the radical agricultural reforms of the 1780s terrible damage was wrought to thousands of prehistoric monuments in Denmark. New forms of land management led to the cultivation of regions which had not been ploughed for more than a thousand years. A profusion of buried treasures from heathen times was ploughed up from the soil-all while their hiding-places, the prehistoric monuments, were damaged.