Career
From 1837 to 1879 he was Custodian of Ancient Monuments and Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters. In 1866, he founded the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm. In 1830 Hildebrand became reader in numismatics at the University of Lund.
About this time he was also taught archaeology by Chief Justice Thomsen in nearby Copenhagen: thus Hildebrand introduced the three-age system to Sweden.
His main scholarly legacy lies within the field of Medieval Anglo-Saxon numismatics, where he produced pioneering catalogues and studies. Much of this work was indirectly due to agricultural reforms in Sweden that led to Viking Period silver coin hoards surfacing at a rate never seen before or after Hildebrand"s day.
The 1864 edition of Hildebrand"s Anglo-Saxon coins in the Swedish Royal Coin Cabinet drew on the evidence of 64 Swedish hoards alongside other European finds to establish the basic chronology of the late Anglo-Saxon coinage, much of which has remained valid after more than a century of subsequent research.