Past landscapes and present-day techniques: reconstructing submerged medieval landscapes in the western part of Sealand Flanders

Abstract

ABSTRACT The coastal wetlands of the former county of Flanders, situated on the border area of Belgium and the Netherlands, belong geographically to a late Holocene landscape that consists mainly of alternations of clay, peat beds and sand deposits. During the later middle ages and the sixteenth century, the old medieval landscape was heavily ravaged by marine influence. The sixteenth-century flooding carried out for military reasons had especially wreaked havoc. This flooding', which had put large parts of the area under water for many decades, plus a huge reorganisation of the whole infrastructure and field pattern afterwards, when new embankments took place, had completely reshaped the medieval landscape. As a consequence, it requires more methodological skills as well as a multi- and even interdisciplinary approach to reconstruct the old cultural landscape. The application of present-day techniques for processing information discovered via aerial archaeology and geoarchaeology, historical geography and social economic history, geography and geomorphology, could generate unexpected reconstructions and interpretations about the cultural landscape before c. 1600. This article presents some preliminary results of this research project, which is focusing on a ‘test area’ in Sealand Flanders (the Netherlands). Although the struggle with water was omnipresent in this area, it stresses especially the importance of anthropogenic factors in the processes of land reclamation, land loss and land transformation.