Een verhaal over trends en continuïteit: aardewerkonderzoek nieuwe stijl toegepast op het aardewerk van Jelsum

In this article the results of the research on the pottery and other clay-wares from the terp remnant of Jelsum are presented. The main material of this study is from the excavation by the Groningen Institute for Archaeology in 2010 of the long escarpment of the terp remnant of Jelsum. Of secondary importance was the material from a smaller excavation on the same location in 1981 by the Fries Museum. While examining the pottery from 2010 a ‘contextual method’ was developed to study the minimum and estimated maximum amount of pottery in secondary context and to provide an impression of the general occurrence of older finds in younger layers. The highest occurrence of pottery in secondary context occurs in layers belonging to the medieval habitation phase, reaching up to 90%. For the earlier phases the minimum percentages of pottery in secondary contexts fluctuate between 3-55%, while estimated maximums range from 25-67%.Though applying this new contextual method takes more time than using the conventional method, this approach gives a better general understanding of the pottery and habitation history of the site, making it worth the effort. The combination of pottery types in the oldest settlement layers, combined with the find of a loom weight in the same context, date the beginning of permanent habitation in Jelsum to around 400 BCE. Though a few stone grit tempered potsherds in a deeper located salt marsh layer point to earlier human activity in the vicinity, these could not be linked to traces of actual habitation here. The number of pottery finds increases in higher and younger layers, peaking in layers from the 1st century CE. The amount of pottery declines in younger layers, perhaps reflecting a decreasing population on the terp. However, during the supposed habitation hiatus of the Frisian Terp Area in the 4th century CE, the terp settlement of Jelsum was still occupied. This demonstrates that the Frisian area was not entirely abandoned. The last pottery in context dates from the early Middle Ages, which probably indicates that from this period onwards occupation was located on another part of the terp. <br/

Adapting to the sea:Human habitation in the coastal area of the northern Netherlands before medieval dike building

Before medieval dike building, the coastal area of the northern Netherlands was a wide, regularly inundated salt-marsh area. Despite the dynamic natural conditions, the area was inhabited already in the Iron Age. The inhabitants adapted to this marine environment by living on artificial dwelling mounds, so-called terps. Terp habitation was a highly successful way of life for over 1500 years, and may be re-introduced as a useful strategy for present and future communities in low-lying coastal regions that are facing accelerated sea-level rise. This already has been recommended in several reports, but detailed knowledge of the technology of terp habitation is usually lacking. The aim of this paper is to present nearly two decades of archaeological research in the coastal region of the northern Netherlands, in order to inform the current debate on the possibilities of adapting to the effects of climate change in low-lying coastal areas. It presents the multi-disciplinary methods of this research and its results, supplying details of terp construction and other strategies such as the construction of low summer dikes that are still useful today. The results and discussion of the presented research also make it possible to describe the conditions that must be met to make terp habitation possible. Terp habitation could have continued, were it not for the considerable subsidence of inland areas due to peat reclamation. That made the entire coastal area increasingly vulnerable to the sea. In response to this threat, dike building began in the 11th or 12th century, but these increasingly higher dikes decreased the water storage capacity and caused impoundment of seawater during storm surges. Moreover, accretion through sedimentation was halted from then on. Unlike terp habitation, the construction of high dikes therefore cannot be considered a sustainable solution for living in low-lying coastal areas in the long term