Search

Although ancient Olympia is usually viewed as a Classical Greek site, most buildings that are visible nowadays were not there yet when Pindar celebrated famous victors or Peisistratos and Alcibiades won their races. More generally, even though new research has substantially improved our knowledge, the early history of the site is often still neglected in introductory presentations of the site. In this article some important main issues are discussed. First, new excavations have revealed that Bronze Age occupation of the area cannot be connected to the later cult, as some scholars have argued in the past. The older remains were covered by flooding of the nearby rivers when the sanctuary was founded in the 11th century BCE. Up to the late 7th century the sanctuary remained an open area around a large ash altar. Its main structure was a large dam protecting it from floods. The temple now associated with Hera, built around 600 BCE, was the first monumental building of the sanctuary. Recent research suggests this may originally have been dedicated to Zeus, but this cannot be proven conclusively. The common idea that this temple was originally a wooden construction has now also been debunked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past plant food consumption has been studied diachronically and spatially for many Dutch settlements. However, research into the plant food consumption of Early Modern Dutch inhabitants of urban settlements is somewhat underrepresented in the scientific archaeobotanical literature. To fill this knowledge gap, archaeobotanical data from cesspits dating to the period ad 1500–1850 contained in the Dutch Relational Archaeobotanical Database were analysed. First, edible plant taxa were distinguished from medicinal plants and potentially edible weeds. Then, seeds and fruits were distinguished from pollen. Finally, the remains were quantified to form an overview of the plant taxa consumed per urban settlement and, from there, to provide insight into regional and temporal changes in plant food availability and preferences. The combined archaeobotanical dataset, consisting of cesspit material from 51 cities, comprised 97 edible plant taxa. Surprisingly, 20 of these taxa are consistently present in 50–100% of all settlements in the 350 years under study. Based on the archaeobotanical finds from the cesspits, we conclude that the overall plant food consumption of Early Modern Dutch urban inhabitants does not seem to have changed very much over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a review of records of pollen and botanical macroremains of a selection of food plants from late and post-medieval cesspits (12th century-19th century ad) in the Netherlands and northern Belgium. The presented data demonstrate that several food plants remain largely invisible in the macrobotanical records. These are all plants from which the flowers or flower buds (Borago officinalis, Capparis, Carthamus tinctorius, Crocus sativus, Syzygium aromaticum) or leaves (Anthriscus cerefolium, Spinacia oleracea) are eaten, or that are typical components of honey (Cistus). As a result, little is known about the import or local production and consumption of these food plants in these times. This review now shows that past use of some of these plants is reflected in the pollen assemblages of (post-) medieval cesspits. For the first time, a large archaeobotanical dataset is presented, including pollen, providing information on the past use of these plants between the 12th and 19th century ad in the Netherlands and Belgium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-medieval archaeology in Flanders (Belgium) is a comparatively young archaeological discipline, even in an historically important region with centres such as Antwerp, Bruges and Ghent. Originating in the slipstream of Flemish urban archaeology during the 1970s, the discipline has struggled for recognition ever since. As a result of more than 40 years of fieldwork, the material record of early-modern and modern history has changed drastically. Yet post-medieval archaeology has not reached its apogee. A framework with its own methods, teaching, research questions and theoretical approaches is still under construction. This paper aims not only at historiographical analysis of the field, but chiefly at defining a clear framework for positioning post-medieval archaeology in one of the most important regions in early-modern and modern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  Botanical investigation of archaeological sites situated in the northwest of the region bounded by the rivers Maas, Scheldt and Demer (‘MSD region’), west of the city of Breda, has provided a great deal of evidence about the landscape and its use in the period between 2000 b.c. and a.d. 1500. From pollen analysis, it appears that this cover-sand area gradually lost its woodlands through human activity after the beginning of the Bronze Age (ca. 2000 b.c.). Patches of woodland did survive there, however, until the early Middle Ages. In contrast to the cover-sand area in the vicinity of ’s-Hertogenbosch and Oss-Ussen in the northeast of the MSD region, the first large heathlands in the Breda area did not evolve until the early Middle Ages. In late prehistory, land use in this area was not much different from that in the micro-region of ’s-Hertogenbosch and Oss-Ussen. In the Bronze Age, Hordeum vulgare ssp. vulgare (hulled six-row barley) and Triticum dicoccon (emmer wheat) were grown. During the Iron Age, Panicum miliaceum (common millet) and T. spelta (spelt wheat) were introduced, but these crops disappeared during the Roman period. The Roman period is remarkable because of the lack of any Mediterranean culinary herbs or exotic fruits. Only pollen of Juglans regia (walnut), found around the transition from the Roman period to the early Middle Ages, indicates the introduction of an exotic tree into the region. From the early Middle Ages onwards, Secale cereale (rye) was the most important cereal, which was grown as a winter crop. In the course of the Middle Ages, arable weeds of the Sclerantho annui-Arnoseridetum plant community appeared, which is associated with the continuous growing of rye. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The material remains and environmental data recovered during a rescue excavation in 2002–03 in the castle of the new town of Middelburg-in-Flanders throw light on the site, region and landscape in wartime. The paper discusses the historical context at the turn of the 16th century, the excavation of the castle, the taphonomy of the chutes, the analysis of the artefacts and ecological data recovered from two garderobe chutes in the upper court, and concludes with a synthesis focussing on the interpretation of the excavated record in the historically attested natural and socio-economic disruption caused by the Spanish-Dutch War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]