Creating a home. Ritual practice in a terp settlement in the northern Netherlands

The terp region of the northern Netherlands is an area with excellent preservation conditions, which make this a suitable area for the study of the remains of ritual practice in the past. One of the most extensively excavated terps is the terp settlement of Ezinge, which has its origins around 500 BC. An inventory of find assemblages that can be interpreted as ritual deposits, resulted in the identification of 142 deposits from the Iron Age alone, many of which are associated with houses. This contribution is concerned with the deposits associated with the life-cycle of houses or performed during inhabitation for the benefit of the inhabitants. Several of these deposits include human remains, either inhumation burials or single, sometimes modified human bones. It is argued that these ritual practices were concerned with the identity, prosperity and continuity of the household, and that the house can be considered a representation of the household

Sherds bring happines:Evidence of deliberately broken pottery

A large part of the pottery in ritual deposits must have been broken deliberately, but deliberate breakage is difficult to distinguish from accidental breakage. This paper describes an experiment with fifteen handmade sherds without context information from the excavation in the terp of Ezinge (northern Netherlands). The sherds dated from between the 5th century BC and the 5th century AD. They were broken with the aid of various implements, similar to objects found during the excavation.Breaking the sherds demands considerable force. The usualdamage is a single, Y-shaped or, rarely, a more complex break with some damage at the point of impact. At the back, only breaks and rarely surface damage can be established. The use of an iron awl can be identified if the awl was placed obliquely on the surface. This position comes naturally if an awl was used to break a complete pot from above or from the inside. Exerting pressure, combined with a rotating movement, usually will cause a break. This method leaves characteristic indentations, which are regularly observed on the excavated pottery from Ezinge. The use of other implements leaves less clearly identifiabletraces of deliberate breakage