Jacob Gerard Nicolaas (Jaap) Renaud (Voorburg, 20 February 1911 - 25 April 2007) was a Dutch archaeologist and adjunct professor at Utrecht University.

At the young age of 14 he already visited The Hague municipality archives to study the history of Binckhorst Castle and its inhabitants.

[1] In the tradition of his family Renaud also became a school teacher, but during the Great Depression he could not acquire a fixed position.

He brought him into contact with professor Nicolaas Bernardus Tenhaeff (1885-1943) from Amsterdam University taught him in private.

van Giffen (1884-1973) from the University of Groningen, and Professor Engelbert Hendrik ter Kuile (1900-1988) from the Rijksdienst voor de Monumentenzorg (the national organization for the preservation of monumental buildings).

[6] During the war period Renaud learned a lot from the advice of architectural history Professors E. ter Kuile from Delft University and M.D.

[3] In 1950 Renaud got an appointment at the Rijksdienst voor Oudheidkundig Bodemonderzoek (ROB), a national government organization for archaeology.

[7] Later in the 1950s the Dutch Research Council (NWO) provided funding for Renaud to work in Caen, Normandy, France.

He thought that the castle had to be considered from a historic, archaeologic, typologic and literary perspective in order to understand the object in its entirety.

On the other hand, from the 1960s onwards, his focus on construction history, and his failure to pick up on new scientific methods of archaeology led to suboptimal results.