Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae (14 March 1821 – 15 August 1885) was a Danish archaeologist, historian and politician, who was the second director of the National Museum of Denmark (1865–1874).

[2] (Needs expansion and content of standard biographies) While in Copenhagen for college, Worsaae began to work as a volunteer with Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, the first director of the National Museum of Denmark.

[4] Similarly, when the Haraldskær Woman, a peat-bog mummy was found in southern Denmark in 1843, she was exhibited as the legendary Queen Gunhild of the early Mediaeval period.

Worsaae disputed this view, arguing that the body was Iron Age in origin, like most from the bogs, and predated any historical persons of the chronicles by at least 500 years.

By controlled excavation and analysis of stratigraphy, he found artifacts that supported Thomsen's Three-Age System, formerly based on the museum collection.

In that period of scholarship, those who could grasp the concept of prehistory were hard pressed to imagine that cultural developments could be discerned within the three ages.

Through excavations of stone-age sites, Worsaae saw that there were distinct trends of coöccurrence: a period with simple tools, signs of hunting and fishing, and with dog bones as the only evidence of domestic animals.

Worsaae commented in his diary that "these enormous piles of oyster shells must represent the remains of meals eaten by stone age people".

[7] Worsaae determined that a second subset of the Stone Age deposits, associated with dolmen burials, showed signs of animal husbandry and agriculture.

For instance, Lewis Henry Morgan, a pioneering American ethnologist, developed his own three-stage system of prehistory in his book, Ancient Society (1877).

He theorized that prehistoric peoples went through progressive stages of "savagery", "barbarism" and "civilization", to be traced by several criteria, including their kinship and social structures, as well as tools and cultivation.

They had two daughters: Jacobine Cathrine Margrethe Worsaae (1869–1951), the elder of the two, married the politician and Governor of the Danish West Indies Henri Konow.