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Original Article
Introduction
The Meuse river enters the Netherlands at Eijsden just south of Maastricht and follows a northerly course through the Limburg province and a small, adjacent part of eastern Belgium and the Dutch province of Brabant, towards the Cuijk and Mook area, 165 km downstream (Fig. 1). This part of the river is called the Meuse valley due to its position in a terraced landscape and is the study area of this paper. The Meuse valley landscape developed under the influence of Pleistocene climate changes, tectonics and human activities. Downstream of it, the river bends westward, and runs through a Holocene delta plain landscape to reach the North Sea in its estuary near Rotterdam.
Fig. 1.
Research area.
[Figure Omitted; See PDF]In the study area, the Late Weichselian and Holocene, lowest terrace and floodplain levels are on average 2-5 km wide. This youngest part of the valley geomorphology comprises the Weichselian Lateglacial Interstadial and Younger Dryas river terraces, dissected by Holocene channel belts, and reflects c. 15,000 years of fluvial and aeolian landscape formation, human habitation and land use. In the course of time, humans started to influence and shape the landscape. Regional geomorphological-geological studies of the Meuse and larger tributaries include Van den Broek & Maarleveld (1963), Kasse et al. (1995, 2005), Huisink (1997) and Tebbens et al. (1999). These studies focused on the Weichselian Pleniglacial to Younger Dryas landscape development, and mainly covered the northern half of the study area (north of the town of Roermond). Comparable studies for the southern part of the Dutch Meuse valley, such as Paulissen (1973), are relatively rare, and pay more attention to the Holocene geomorphological elements. In part, the difference in research attention is due to the difference in geomorphology of the two sections: a narrow Holocene floodplain in the north and a broader one in the south where the Meuse valley crosses the Roer Valley Graben.
With the start of the 'Maaswerken' project in the mid-1990s and due to the 1992 Valletta (Malta) Convention legislation, large-scale archaeological research along the Meuse increased significantly. At that time, little was known about human habitation, especially in the Holocene bottom of the Meuse valley (see e.g. Verhart, 2000; Rensink, 2017). Since then an increasing amount...