Investigating medieval village formation in the Netherlands

Abstract

For the Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency (RCE), the state of knowledge on medieval village formation in the Netherlands was investigated based on the output of a decade of ‘Malta-archaeology’. The project made clear that the huge amount of development-led archaeological research has brought only limited progress on this particular theme, because of the scale of the excavations, the focus of the observations and a general lack of research frameworks at village level and regional frameworks specifically addressing village formation from which targeted research questions can be derived. In addition, very little research has been undertaken within presently inhabited villages, resulting in a major bias in the dataset towards deserted medieval settlements. To increase our understanding on village formation and the development of villages, archaeological research needs to be conducted within municipal research agendas based on an historical-geographical framework which provide specific hypotheses and questions to test and explore. Moreover, syntheses would greatly benefit from a continuity of knowledge in the region and complementary (academic) observations within existing historical villages.