Local Identities: Landscape and Community in the Late Prehistoric Meuse-Demer-Scheldt Region

The area defined by the Meuse, Demer and Scheldt rivers (bordering the Netherlands and Belgium) is a region that has been subjected to intensive archaeological fieldwork in recent times and forms an excellent case study for exploring the transition between the Bronze and Iron Ages in northwest Europe. This revised version of Gerritsen's thesis seeks to explore and explain the process by which small, relatively mobile groups of the early and middle Bronze Age were transformed into larger groups with a greater sense of collective social identity, living in a more ordered and fixed landscape. Gerritsen examines evidence for house-building and more fixed habitation, structured deposition practices, fixed burial places, arable farming and ritual practices. Above all, he looks at evidence for the emotional bonds and sense of belonging and identity embodied in more stable communities and in new concepts of permanence and of landscape.