This is a remarkable fact. Stolpe was not trained as an archaeologist. He was an insect specialist who pivoted to excavation because he found himself in an extraordinarily productive archaeological site and had the energy and discipline to document what he found. His methods, by modern standards, were crude: he did not collect samples for soil analysis, did not apply stratigraphic principles systematically in ways that modern archaeology requires, and relied on workers who were not archaeologists. He missed things. He made assumptions that later scholarship has needed to correct.
But he labeled the bones. He drew the plans. He recorded the grave numbers. He wrote up his findings. And when a challenge arose, more than a century later, about whether the bones tested in the 2017 study were really the bones from grave Bj 581, the answer was found in the ink marks he had put on those bones.
The labeling practice that Stolpe followed — marking each recovered element with its grave designation — was not universal among excavators of his era. It was a disciplined, systematic choice that required effort and forethought. That effort, invested in 1878, paid dividends in 2019 when it allowed the 2019 paper’s authors to address the chain-of-custody objection.
This has implications for current archaeological practice. The decisions made during excavation — what to label, how to store, what records to keep, how to document the spatial relationship between skeletal elements and associated goods — have consequences that extend far beyond the excavation itself. An excavation poorly documented in 2026 may be impossible to reanalyze in 2126 because the context information was not recorded.