West Frisian farmers in the Bronze Age were a lot more stable than thought. Farmers lived together in the same area for generations and as a community they took care of the common drainage. This is apparent from doctoral research by Wouter Roessingh.
Farms in the south of the Netherlands were widely separated during the Middle and Late Bronze Age (1500-800 BC) and farmers only stayed in one place for a short time. In West Friesland, on the other hand, farmers lived closer together, but archaeologists did not know how long they stayed. Wouter Roessingh has investigated what happened in West Friesland. With his PhD research he shows that the farmers lived together in villages for generations and that they maintained them together.
Old data
During his research into West Frisian settlements, Roessingh looked at the relationship between farms, fields and burial fields. For this he used data from the last century. Before the land consolidation would start at the end of the seventies, archaeological field research was still carried out quickly in West Friesland. Time and resources were limited at the time, so the research results were never fully developed. The assumptions made by the archaeologists at the time could never be tested either, since for a long time little archaeological research took place in West Friesland.
Roessingh works as an archaeologist and, prior to his research, already had the idea that something was not right with these assumptions. “During an excavation in Enkhuizen in 2009, we found a village, while according to the models from the 1970s, no habitation could be possible at that location. Bronze Age residents would only have built their farms on the high parts of West Friesland, because the rest would be too wet. The history turned out to be more complex and I wanted to know more about it.” Roessingh has now listed and analyzed all the old data. This provides a few innovative insights.
Wrong assumptions
Many people often think that the west of the Netherlands was one large wetland in prehistoric times, but until the end of the Bronze Age, nothing is less valuable. “It was a fairly flat area with freshwater lakes to the east and lots of forests full of large wild animals such as brown bears and moose. Their bones were recovered here and preserved in the clay so well that we can now see where they came from with isotope research,” explains Roessingh. Because of the good conservation conditions of the West Frisian soil, there are no bones in Europe, as well as landscapes, as well preserved as here.
During his comparative research, Roessingh discovered that his own assumptions were sometimes unconsciously based on modern imagery. “A personal eye-opener was that I unconsciously applied the image of a yard, demarcated with posts or ditches, to the Bronze Age. But this form of a yard only came into existence later. We found many Bronze Age trenches but were unable to reconstruct individual yards. It now appears that the ditches had a joint function. They were sometimes hundreds of meters long and formed the boundary and drainage system of all the yards together, of the entire settlement.”
In addition to the unexpected length of the trenches, their existence has provided another new and striking insight, says the archaeologist:“Digging these trenches in the stiff ground has been a huge job. This implies that the residents must have dug and maintained the trenches together.”
Stacked landscape
Contrary to all previous expectations, farmers in West Friesland turned out to continue to live in the same place for generations. Roessingh saw a 'stacked landscape' in the data, of several farms and ditches that were built and dug at approximately the same spot over time.
“At least a hundred farms have been found near Bovenkarspel from the period 1500 – 1100 BC. We just don't know how long such a farm lasted. We now assume about twenty-five years. That means that in those four hundred years about six farms were inhabited at the same time. But we don't have all the boundaries of the village yet, so it could have been more.”
Roessingh has analyzed the floor plans of a total of 125 farms. Remarkably, they were all built with the short sides facing east and west. The archaeologist cannot explain why this is so. "Out of habit? Or because the predominantly westerly wind can blow through it nicely? We don't know.”
Business section
The farms were long, about fifteen to nineteen meters, and six meters wide. However, no traces of different rooms, stables or fire pits can be found in the ground tracks of the farms. Still, Roessingh thinks that there was indeed a business part in the farm. “The old assumption is that only the presence of extra posts can indicate stables, but I saw an interruption of the ditch on the short east side of the house on all the floor plans. I think this was the entrance for the cattle and any carts. This made it easier for them to enter the farms than via a plank across the ditch on the west side.”
Archaeologist Luc Amkreutz, curator of prehistory at the National Museum of Antiquities and not involved in the research, thinks this is a plausible assumption. "But you would like to test that by seeing if there are other indications, for example the presence of a lot of phosphate from manure in the soil of that part of the farm." In any case, he is happy with the research, because there is still a wealth of information hidden behind excavations that are on the shelf.
“It is a relevant study in terms of content because Roessingh looks at a piece of habitation history in an integral way. The settlements, fields, plots, graves and early hydraulic engineering are seen in context and followed through time. It is striking that there is a strong sense of community and the commitment of an entire residential community when building new farms and constructing ditches, for example. That makes it a planned landscape.”
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Roessing's research is part of the Farmers of the Coast research project on West Friesland, which also examined the bones of cattle that the farmers kept here. The cattle herd turned out to be far from local. “The cattle came partly from sandy soils such as Brabant, Limburg and the east of the Netherlands.”
Through this research project, we also know that Bronze Age dwellers lived by raising livestock, growing crops such as emmer wheat, barley and linseed, hunting and fishing, and gathering wild plants and fruits. About fifteen to twenty relatives lived together in the farms, along with their livestock. These were about five cattle, three pigs and ten goats or sheep.
The farms together formed small settlements. “These settlements were far from closed. During excavations in West Friesland we found many tools made of flint from Scandinavia, bronze from England, luxury goods such as ceramics and jewelry from Germany and Denmark and so on.”
In the course of the Middle Bronze Age, Roessingh saw a clear change in the layout of the villages. From 1000 BC, people start living in clusters, probably on mounds, and dig deeper ditches for drainage. At the end of the Bronze Age, around 800 BC, people leave West Friesland. Roessingh:“There was a climatic crisis. The lakes in the east overflowed by another drainage of the Vecht and the sea level rose. The landscape became wetter and eventually many people left the area.” From then on, our image of a swampy Holland starts to make sense.