Changing ways: Patterns of connectivity, habitation and persistence in Northwest European lowlands during the first millennium AD

Abstract

This study focuses on reconstructing large-scale changes in connectivity and habitation during the Roman and early-medieval periods in the present-day Netherlands. The transition between these periods is characterized by severe pan-European political, socio-economic, and demographic changes. Additionally, recent studies in physical geography and biogeology increasingly point at marked climatic and landscape changes, such as river avulsions and floods, during this time interval. The extent to which these environmental and cultural dynamics were entwined and mutually influential is generally unknown, especially on a larger scale level. Lowlands such as the Netherlands are well suited to study these complex interactions since boundary conditions, i.e. the set of conditions required for maintaining the existing equilibrium in a region, in such areas are relatively sensitive to changes. This thesis primarily has a methodological ambition, which is to reconstruct boundary conditions and to develop spatiotemporal frameworks for cultural-landscape changes during the first millennium AD. To this end, I have applied an evidence-based, multi-proxy, transdisciplinary modelling approach in order to reconstruct spatial changes in Roman and early-medieval route networks, long-distance transport, settlement patterns, palaeodemography, and land-use systems, and to determine their interaction with synchronously changing environmental settings and forcings.