The topic of this book is the Origin of the Dutch coastal landscape during the Holocene. ­ The landscape evolution is vizualized in series of palaeogeographical maps and the driving mechanisms behind the environmental changes are discussed. The practice to make palaeogeographical map reconstructions in the Netherlands developed after the Second World War when a lot of regional geological and soil scientific mapping programs were carried out by government institutions and universities. These maps show when and how the surveyed sediments were formed. The palaeogeographical map reconstructions are subsequently used for the understanding and modelling of the long-term coastal evolution, coastal-management issues, landscape-archaeological purposes and for education and public information reasons. Geoarchaeological investigations play an important role in this study. Geological and palaeo-environmental data from archaeological excavations (‘key sites') provided essential information for the palaeolandscape reconstructions. In the presented regional- and local-case studies of this book, examples of these sites are shown.

The basic problem is to what extent we can know past and mainly invisible landscapes, and how we can use this still hidden knowledge for actual sustainable management of landscape's cultural and historical values. It has also been acknowledged that heritage management is increasingly about 'the management of future change rather than simply protection'. This presents us with a paradox: to preserve our historic environment, we have to collaborate with those who wish to transform it and, in order to apply our expert knowledge, we have to make it suitable for policy and society. The answer presented by the Protection and Development of the Dutch Archaeological-Historical Landscape programme (pdl/bbo) is an integrative landscape approach which applies inter- and transdisciplinarity, establishing links between archaeological-historical heritage and planning, and between research and policy.

Using the most recently discovered archaeological and textual evidence, Christopher Loveluck explores the transformation of Northwest Europe, from c.AD 600 to 1150.

Exploring the Low Countries at a regional level, van Bavel highlights the importance of localized structures for determining the nature of social transitions and economic growth.

Twenty-three contributions by leading archaeologists from across Europe explore the varied forms, functions and significances of fortified settlements in the 8th to 10th centuries AD. These could be sites of strongly martial nature, upland retreats, monastic enclosures, rural seats, island bases, or urban nuclei. But they were all expressions of control - of states, frontiers, lands, materials, communities - and ones defined by walls, ramparts or enclosing banks. Papers run from Irish cashels to Welsh and Pictish strongholds, Saxon burhs, Viking fortresses, Byzantine castra, Carolingian creations, Venetian barricades, Slavic strongholds, and Bulgarian central places, and coverage extends fully from northwest Europe, to central Europe, the northern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Strongly informed by recent fieldwork and excavations, but drawing also where available on the documentary record, this important collection provides fully up-to-date reviews and analyses of the archaeology of the distinctive settlement forms that characterized Europe in the Early Middle Ages.

This volume investigates environmental and political crises that occurred in Europe during the late Middle Ages and the early Modern Period, and considers their effects on people’s lives. At this time, the fragile human existence was imagined as a ‘Dance of Death’, where anyone, regardless of social status or age, could perish unexpectedly. This book covers events ranging from cooling temperatures and the onset of the Little Ice Age, to the frequent occurrence of epidemic disease, pest infestations, food shortages and famines. Covering the mid-fourteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries, this collection of essays considers a range of countries between Iceland (to the north), Italy (to the south), France (to the west) and the westernmost parts of Russia (to the east). This wide-reaching volume considers how deeply climate variability and changes affected and changed society in the late medieval to early modern period, and asks what factors, other than climate, interfered in the development of environmental stress and socio-economic crises. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Environmental and Climate History, Environmental Humanities, Medieval and Early Modern History and Historical Geography, as well as Climate Change and Environmental Sciences.