Peter Oluf Brøndsted

Peter Oluf Brøndsted (17 November 1780 – 26 June 1842), Danish archaeologist and traveller.

Brøndsted was born at Fruering in Jutland. After studying at the University of Copenhagen (initially majoring in theology but moving to philology from 1802 onwards) he visited Paris in 1806 with his friend Georg Koës. After remaining there two years, they went together to Italy. Both were zealously attached to the study of antiquities and the tastes and interests they held in common led them, in 1810, to join an expedition to Greece with Otto Magnus von Stackelberg, Carl Haller von Hallerstein, the German painter Jakob Linckh, and the then Austrian consul in Greece George Christian Gropius. Unexpectedly, the following year, Koës died on Zante at the age of 29 of pneumonia. The group went its separate ways in order to carry out excavations at different places. Whilst one uncovered the Temple of Zeus on Aegina and the temple of Apollo at Bassae in Arcadia, Brøndsted and Linckh in the winter of 1811/12 led the excavations of the shrine of Apollo at Karthaia on Kea. Brøndsted was the first Dane who was involved in archeological work in Greece.

After three years of active researches in Greece, Brøndsted returned to Copenhagen in 1813, where, as a reward for his labours, he was appointed extraordinary professor of Greek and philology in the university. He married Frederikke, Koës's sister, who died after the birth of their third child. During these years, Brøndsted gathered and organized the notes and materials he had brought out of Greece. His lectures awakened great interest in many students, who even after his death sent out even more Danish expeditions to the Mediterranean world under his successor Ussing (Lindos on Rhodos).

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