Abstract
It could be argued that nowhere is an understanding of the changing nature of the land–sea interface more important than in the Netherlands. The devastating impact of the North Sea flood in 1953, which killed more than 1800 people, not only resulted in the development and implementation of the Netherlands’ Delta Plan but also provided the impetus for detailed surface and subsurface investigations of the Dutch coastal landscape. An understanding of the Holocene evolution of the Dutch coastal landscape informs both contemporary coastal management and modelling of future changes. Peter Vos has produced an impressive synthesis of geological, palaeoenvironmental, archaeological and historical data and then visualized this information in a series of palaeogeographic maps. This beautifully illustrated book starts with an explanation of the basic principles of landscape reconstruction and lithostratigraphic analysis. Chapter 2 focuses on Vos’ palaeogeographical maps constructed at the national scale which provide snapshots of the Netherlands’ (palaeo) geography at 9000 BC, 5500 BC, 3850 BC, 2750 BC, 1500 BC, 500 BC, AD 100, AD 800, AD 1500, AD 1850 and AD 2000. The maps draw on data from geological maps, borehole records, soil maps, morphological maps constructed using laser altimetry and historical maps. These reconstructions are underpinned by a chronological framework constructed using 14C dates from organic remains and inorganic carbonates and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) depositional ages of sediments. The volume also captures the changing nature of human interaction with the coastal environment, both in terms of the exploitation of coastal resources and in dealing with the impacts of storm surges, as it shifts its focus to documenting and visualizing change at the regional and local scales.
The interaction between natural and human-induced change is summarized in the first section of Chapter 3, where Vos focuses on the southwest Netherlands – the Province of Zeeland (literally sea-land) – and its flooding history. Vos argues that peat digging, construction of dikes creating polders from salt marshes, and changing and damming of channels not only created a cultural landscape but also increased the vulnerability of the area to storm surges. The construction of the dikes and the drainage of the marshes resulted in a lowering of surface elevations in the areas underlain by peat. In addition, the widespread practice of extraction of salt from peat during the Mediaeval Period also resulted in the lowering of ground levels – making the consequences of dike breaches by storm surges much more damaging. Vos presents a storm surge calendar for the period AD 1000–2000 in which there has been an attempt to distinguish between major inundations, minor ones and ‘military’ ones, in which dikes were deliberately cut by Dutch troops during military conflicts. Vos cautions against interpreting the changing frequencies of flood events in the calendar in terms of climate change, arguing that ‘… negligence of the dikes, insufficient coordination, incompetence, political circumstances, wars and economic crises all played important roles’ (Vos, 2015: 88). Clearly an uncritical interpretation of this type of record as simply indicating changes in storminess in the North Atlantic and North Sea should be avoided! Instead, we have a classic case of a system transformed by human action that then requires constant vigilance and maintenance. Given the substantial increase in populated areas of the Dutch coast since 1953, the maintenance of flood defences remains a political and economic imperative. The other two sections of Chapter 3 deal with the landscape history of the Oer-IJ tidal system of North Holland and the Holocene landscape reconstruction of part of the Wadden Sea area from 500 BC to present. All the reconstructions are again visualized in series of palaeogeographic maps. A substantial appendix is provided giving details of all of the dates used to develop chronologies within the regional study areas and provides a critical commentary on these dates and their interpretation. Details of particular excavations, borehole logs and sediment profiles also provide invaluable information.
A series of geoarchaeological case studies is presented in Chapter 4. These touch on the reconstruction of the Mesolithic lowland landscape in the Port of Rotterdam and landscape reconstruction of a Bronze Age settlement near Alkmaar in North Holland. In the first of these case studies, a novel methodology is employed for what was essentially a rescue excavation of an area of the Yangtze Harbour within the Port of Rotterdam. The multi-stage methodology employed, including geophysical surveys and boreholes, enabled the construction of a palaeo-landscape model that in turn enabled investigations to focus on the selection of archaeological sites for sampling and excavation. As was the case with the regional-level studies, the case study material is supplemented by the dating and stratigraphic evidence used in the palaeoenvironmental reconstructions.
The book concludes with Chapter 5 which provides a synthesis of Holocene landscape evolution in terms of the influence of changes in sea level, climate and human interactions. The Dutch coastal zone is an important example of the way(s) in which anthropogenic interventions transition from mitigation to management. Captured in the snapshots provided by Vos’ palaeogeographic maps, we see the Holocene becoming the Anthropocene. The immediate future for the Netherlands coast will not be straightforward as tensions are apparent between soft and hard coastal engineering, in an environment in which the ecological as well as the geomorphological status of beach and dune systems are of increasing concern (Oost et al., 2012), and where there are calls for a return to more natural ‘dynamic’ coastal environments, particularly on the part of ecologists working on coastal dune systems in the Netherlands (Arens and Geelen, 2006).
This splendid book is a PhD thesis, albeit a very unusual one in that the body of work that it contains has developed over Vos’ working life since 1981. This volume reflects a deep understanding of all aspects of the Holocene evolution of the Dutch coast from a natural system to one in which anthropogenic factors are now dominant.