'Leffinge - Oude Werf': the first archaeozoological collection from a terp settlement in coastal Flanders

In the Low Countries, the study of animal remains from Iron Age to early medieval coastal settlements has a long tradition. As early as 1913, Van Giffen published a pioneering study dealing with zoological finds from the coastal sites known as wierden in (the province of) Groningen and as terpen in neighbouring Friesland (Fig. 1). His work was later continued by the Biologisch-Archeologisch Instituut founded in 1920 at the University of Groningen. Over the last decades, within that institute now known as the Groninger Instituut voor Archeologie, Wietske Prummel has promoted more of this research, as witnessed by numerous publications (see the bibliography in this volume). They prove over and over again that the Iron Age to early medieval terp settlements (dwelling sites upon artificial mounds erected in the coastal plain in order to exploit the rich landscape of salt marshes and salty grasslands) present one of the finest case studies for the study of the interaction between humans and their environment in the Low Countries (see Bazelmans et al. 2009 for a state of the art of the archaeological interpretation of these sites).

The account by Tys (2004a), of the history of settlement studies for the early medieval Flemish coastal plain, clarifies why it was long thought that terp settlements did not play a role in the development of the exploitation of the Flemish coast. Although their supposed presence was mentioned by De Loë as early as the beginning of the 20th century AD (1905a; 1905b), the idea of Flemish terp settlements has gradually been dismissed. More than a scientific generation later, Verhulst (1965) saw the terpen only as temporary resting places for early medieval sheep flocks, exploiting the salt marshes and salty grasslands in the coastal plain following a system of transhumance, starting from bases in inland sandy Flanders. According to Verhulst (1965), the first early medieval permanent settlements were not erected on artificial platforms but merely represented dwelling places at ground level (that never evolved into raised mounds). A further critical insight was presented by Verhaeghe (1977), who demonstrated that many artificial mounds in the coastal plain did not date back to early medieval times but were indeed late medieval in origin. The end result was the common opinion that, in Flanders, early medieval terp settlements comparable to those from Groningen and Friesland simply did not exist. However, renewed historical-geographical analysis now postulates that terpen were indeed present in the southern part of the Low Countries. Evidence was found not only in the radial field systems around villages, such as Bredene and Leffinge, but also in the presence of early medieval sites around them (Tys 2004a, Loveluck and Tys 2006). Recently, one of these surrounding sites, 'Leffinge - Oude Werf', was explored by means of a test excavation and proved to be a terp itself (Deckers 2011). The animal remains collected comprise the first archaeozoological collection from such a site in Flanders, and are presented here as a humble addition to the impressive corpus of data gathered from terp settlements in the Netherlands by Wietske Prummel and colleagues.