Professor Emeritus Sigried De Laet

Sigfried de Laet was born in Ghent in 1915. He studied at the university there and was awarded a doctorate in classical philology in 1937. Although he first worked as a school teacher de Laet soon returned to his old university as an assistant lecturer and, a decade later, still in his early thirties, was well known in European archaeological circles as both teacher and field worker. His interest had grown progressively from the literature of Roman antiquity towards archaeology, first Gallo-Roman, then that of western and northern Europe in prehistoric and protohistoric times. After the war he spent two terms at Cambridge where he made the acquaintance of Glyn Daniel who, with O G S Crawford, was to be instrumental in the publication in English of some of de Laet’s work, originally written in Flemish or French. In 1947 he was appointed to the Chair of Archaeology at Ghent and in 1952 he undertook the secretaryship of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Science, an office which provided an opportunity to promote international co-operation in archaeology. This was a cause of special importance to de Laet who was all too mindful of the political, religious and linguistic divisions within his own country, the origins of which he felt were rooted in remote times. Through de Laet’s good offices, the IVth Atlantic Colloquium was held at Ghent in 1975 and he edited the conference papers, published in l976 as Acculturation and Continuity in Atlantic Europe, mainly during the Neolithic period and the Bronze Age. He was a strong advocate of the use of the natural sciences in archaeology: geology, anthropology, palaeontology, chemistry, the study of radioactivity, etc., which, in Belgium at least, was innovative in the immediate post-war period. De Laet directed excavations at Postel, the La Têne tombs at the Lommel-Kattenbos cemetery and the Merovingian cemetery at Lutlommel, and travelled widely in Europe and the USA. He was a joint-editor of Helinium from its inception in l961 until it ceased publication in 1995, and was elected to the Académie royale flamande de Belgique. As well as Helinium he was a regular contributor to Dissertations Archaeologicae Gandenses, Fundamenta, Archaeologia Belgica and other learned journals and his monographs include De Voorgeschiendenis der Lage Landen, 1959; La Préhistoire de L’Europe, 1967; Prehistorische Kulturen in het Zuiden de Lage Landen, 1974 and La Belgique d’avant les Romains (1982). His first book to appear in English, though originally published in Flemish and French, was Archaeology and its Problems, 1957, translated by Ruth Daniel, followed by The Low Countries, 1958, in Thames and Hudson’s Ancient Peoples and Places series. As de Laet was always the first to acknowledge, he was well served by his assistant Jacques Nenquin, who was not only researcher but translator, photographer and general bagman. Nenquin in due course followed his mentor as Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology in the University of Ghent and was, in turn, elected an Honorary Fellow in 1983. De Laet died in 1999.