Even before his employment as a deputy curator at the National Museum of Denmark from 1919 on, Hatt had made a name for himself as an ethnographer. He analysed the cut, materials and technical solutions of Arctic skin clothing as traces of history. Based on his findings, he developed a distinction between coastal and inland cultures that was used to identify two different centres of Inuit cultural development. His model was impactful at the time but was later superseded by more complex understandings of Arctic cultural development.

Hatt’s museum work gradually drew him away from ethnography and towards archaeology. His involvement in the excavation of the Iron Age settlement at Ginnerup in Thy, led by the archaeologist Hans Kjær (1873–1932), was a breakthrough.

Kjær applied the new excavation method of removing the topsoil as a single layer to expose the whole settlement. This revealed postholes, wall lines and fireplaces and made it possible to interpret houses and settlements as coherent structures. This method came to characterise Hatt’s subsequent work and Danish archaeology as a whole.

Hatt’s most innovative work dealt with the Celtic system of rectangular fields on Jutlandic heathlands. Systematic surveys, cross sections of embankments and analyses of plough marks revealed that the fields had been created through cultivation with the ard, a primitive plough without a mould board that necessitated cross-ploughing.

The regularity of the fields was interpreted as an indication of private ownership and hereditary practices rather than collective management. The landscape appeared as an organised structure where the control of plots played a key role. This understanding became fundamental to Northern European landscape research and the study of Iron Age societies.

Over the 1930s, Hatt developed an interest in racial biology and its ideas of ‘the human races’ and their geographic dispersion. Today, his writings from this time appear racist, but in fact his evaluation of the adaptiveness and cultural potential of different peoples conformed to a concept of racial hierarchy that was widespread in science and society at the time.

During this time, his research also gradually moved towards political geography. He analysed trade routes, relationships between the great powers and geopolitical tension and warned that Central Europe was so fragmented that the area was incapable of ‘standing up militarily’ to the great powers.

At the time, this seemed like a straightforward strategic assessment, rooted in the prevailing logics of geopolitical power, but it has an unfortunate resonance with the Nazi narrative of the region’s weakness requiring a strong, unifying Germany – not that this was Hatt’s intention.

However, during the German occupation of Denmark, this line of thinking developed into actual sympathies: at the suggestion of the Danish government, Hatt was a co-founder of Dansk-Tysk Forening (the Danish-German Association) and gave radio lectures defending the German government’s foreign policy and calling for German victory. After the war, he was convicted of ‘disgraceful national behaviour’ and had to give up his professorship, although he kept his pension.

Hatt’s post-war years were characterised by isolation and bitterness, but he continued his research. He returned to ethnography and collected strange stories of cultivated plants and self-sacrificing ‘corn mothers’ – mythical female figures associated with crop fertility and sacrificial harvest themes – in Asia and the Americas.

To Hatt, these common themes suggested cross-Pacific connections. These were his last great syntheses, developed with the same insistence and curiosity as when he used to cycle across the fields to unearth the traces of the past with his trowel.

The chapter is written by Dorthe Chakravarty.