 So today what I would like to talk about is something different than what we've been doing before. You heard in Janik's talk that we've been working a lot or increasingly with market squares like this one for example. But today I'd like to take a slightly different approach and focus on something more recent and something that's not been done that much actually or not in Flanders anyway and look at the town's edges. So this is today's presentation and I'd like to just tell you that this is still kind of work in progress. Some of the analyses are still ongoing but I'll tell you about these in a little while. So here what you see is the town of Iper and some of the English speaking people here might know it as Wipers where you go on Pilgrimage to see the last post to see the World War graves. So the town is located over here quite close to the North Sea coast and this is a map from the 16th century where you can see the first town rampart or the earlier town rampart around the town and on this one, it's not the best picture, but you see the cadastral plan of today underneath the 17th century reinforcements or rampart. So this is where we are and we have looked at two sites. They were dug in I think 2015 if I'm not mistaken. That were in the time that we're interested in not yet part of this town wall. So there was an actual urban fabric on there, but we do see consistency for example with this road. So you have to kind of think away this ditch and rampart for the time that we'll be looking at in this presentation. So as I said, we have two different profiles and something went wrong with my plans here, but that's okay. Basically we have section 25 which sits down here and if you go back to the previous plan you can see that's around this area. It's a section through a profile. I'll show it to you in a minute. And then we have another section that sits over here. As you can see, there is still a road running through a current road. There was a road probably back to the 12th century. This is our hypothesis anyway, and that's what came out of the excavations as well. So these are those two sections that I was showing you and you'll see these a lot again. So I apologize for all the gray and the brown, but it's just what we have to work with in a temperate climate. And that's what it'll be. So this is the section that's more to the south. This is a section that's alongside the road. And basically the main questions the archaeologists had when excavating this site was how to understand the darker, so the homogenized deposits on site. For instance, this one and this one. And also some of the more homogenous deposits in the other section. So that was one of the main research questions. Also, is there a difference between these dark earths, between the different locations on the sites? And then another question were these walking surfaces or what archaeologists hypothesized were walking surfaces that you can see are darker here, here, and in this picture it's not that clear, but again here, here, here, they could just see them, but they were actually quite thin, so it was difficult to identify them in the field. So those were the two main questions for the micro morphologists. And what I'd like to do for the rest of the talk is just take you through these sections from bottom to top for each location and kind of build up the story through time. So we'll start with our section 25, so the left one. And there we see that in the bottom. This is actually quite special because we don't find them a lot nowadays is a relic pre-holocene soil that was created like this. So you see these features, these vertical tongues and these cracks that were created because of permafrost. So this was quite interesting to find on site underneath a town. When we go up we see a few interesting features, so we're looking at this first dark earth now. This dark earth was found in both of the sections. Sorry, it's a bit confusing. That's basically the first moment when something is going on. And then we found that actually in both of the locations the same thing was happening. And we had basically an agricultural topsoil and some of the evidence we have for this are, for example, these cut marks that you can see in thin section and a lot of bioturbation, of course. One of the things we didn't get as much as you would expect in a manured horizon was a lot of anthropogenic materials. So we didn't have that much evidence for, for example, household waste being dumped or anything like this. We had some charcoal and that was pretty much it. And actually in this part what we would like to do is have an additional analysis of the phytoliths in thin section to determine which types of crops were kept here. So this is the first part of the site and this is currently not dated very well. So I can't tell you exactly when this is happening. The first thing I can tell you or a bit more in a bit more detail about dating is when we get to this first dark lamination and this is only in the the location of section 25. So now we'll be looking just at this one location and then we'll move to the one closer to the road in a bit. So what is going on here? Basically what we see in this part of the thin section, which is about, let's say, this is about one centimeter and a half. We see kind of a succession of alternating lenses of charred material and and more clean sandy sediment. So you can see this here, a darker lens, a lighter lens, darker lens and basically this part is full of that. With very distinctive compositions and what we also see is a horizontal orientation of all of the components and also traces of trampling. So we've interpreted this part as indeed a walking surface, but we could say more than this. It's not just a walking surface. It's actually a protected environment because all of this is very well preserved. So our interpretation is now that it's an in situ house floor, so a domestic floor, which dates probably somewhere in the 12th century. So this is our first evidence of occupation in this location of the site, which is really on the edge of where the town was at that moment. And in this section here, you can see the charcoal, which is quite distinctive and occurs a lot in house floors, also of different times, different places. And underneath it, you see the remains of again charred remains of plants, but they are all very horizontal, as you would expect. And underneath we have some partially molten phytoliths, I can show you here. So here you see the remains of a dendritic phytolith and here they will molten through so that could testify to the use of ash, for example, plant ash, as a floor cleaner, for example, or to keep it dry, because we are in a very wet general environment in Flanders. So what we have here is basically different parts of a floor and what we often get here is like a preparation layer that is more sediment rich where you won't be finding many artifacts, for example, or many interesting things even in thin sections for what people are doing on the floor, but then in the dirtier parts or in the more charred parts, that's if you're lucky enough to have them, that's where you'll find the more interesting artifacts and so on. So we can try to imagine it, for example, a little bit like this. Don't mind the material culture, I just want you to look at the floors. The material culture is all wrong, but we have this kind of dirt floor that's accumulating, being renewed through time and so on. And on top of this, we get what I just said, one of these preparation floors. So it's possible that in between some layers are clean, swept away, and then we get a preparation layer that is very sediment rich, very clay rich. Here you can see the birefringent clay inton section and also some reddening. So we could have some in-situ burning going on, but it's very difficult to tell because oftentimes, again, these are truncated and a new floor is deposited on top or used on top. And that's exactly what happens here. I don't have a separate slide, but basically here you have this preparation layer and a very, very thin lens of active floor, as we would call it again. So then the next part is one of these famous dark earths, what's going on here. Again, we have a lot of evidence for an agricultural use, so we have a cut mark right here. That's a very clear one, again, the bioturbation. And here we are getting a little bit more material from clear manuring or clearer manuring, but again, phytolith analysis is really needed to understand it better. So we have probably a crop field on top of this house. A house layer is truncated, a crop field on top. What happens next? Again, one of these indoors trampled house layers with some organic material. And in this case, what we found throughout this whole area were these semi-preserved continuous bands of wood, of woody tissue. So we are hypothesizing that these might have been wooden planks that decayed in situ afterwards, but those were actually present. So this is for the first location. So a wooden floor, this is not an archaeological one, this is my own, but just a wooden floor. Now if we move to the next section, I want to see if I can show you on the big plan. No, I can't. I'll show it to you on the big plan a little bit later, but we're now in a completely different context, even though they're close to each other, this is not comparable at all. So apart from this bottom layer, which was used for probably agriculture, we are seeing a very different surface. And what is happening here, it's basically these four top thin sections that I want to walk you through really quickly. We get three kind of different types of deposits alternating. So I'll just explain these to you briefly, and then I'll give you the overview of what was happening. In the first part we have, again, a covered surface. Everything is quite well preserved. It's a different kind of activity surface or floor surface than we were getting inside the houses. This is actually much more organic. It's anomalously rich in all kinds of organic tissue. So it's wood chips, stems, barks, anything you can get. And here we have interpreted this as either like grass matting or more potentially or more likely an animal's stable, but an indoor animal's stable. What we didn't get was evidence of coprolites, but that's not really uncommon to get in microbiological studies. We've seen it before in different stables that we don't really get the coprolitic material. We get more of the plant base. So this is the first thing you can imagine. We don't know which animal was there because we don't have any coprolites, but we can imagine different things. Next up we have a very thick layer that truncates this stable and that again is a preparation layer. It's deposited by humans. It's very sediment rich and there's not that much going on. But then on top it gets more interesting because here it's completely different. We're encountering an outdoors area for the first time or for the first time where it's in an active, interesting, town-like phase. And what is going on here is that we have a gradual input of organic material that is trampled against walking surfaces but also different types of anthropogenic inclusions. And now this, I don't know in how much detail Janik has told you about the marketplace of Veer, the closest comparison we have to this kind of accumulation is actually a market square. So there is some traffic, intensified traffic going on, people are doing things in the area. And what we sometimes also get here that we didn't get in need was a small-scale dumping of ash. So not just spreading it on the floor but really dumps in different phases. And you could imagine this and I just want to show you the location. This is where it gets interesting. We are now close to this road. So we could imagine this actually as a type of maybe street market or a road people are passing through. This is convenient for people to sell things. So this is potentially how you can imagine it but with less sun and of course different material culture. We are in Flanders. So imagine this in a drizzly wet muddy context without sun, more clouds. So actually we have some renditions. It is from Lear, not from Iper from the 16th century. And here you can see how it would be potentially busy market stalls, things falling around. Again, they're drawing it sunny. You should imagine it cloudy. So I'll just walk you through these surfaces because they kind of repeat each other. What we get here is again a small-scale dumping of ash, waste material, mostly combustion waste. And then outdoor area with more fresh organic matter. So we see kind of differences in what is going on but it stays this kind of heavy traffic, outdoor street area for all this time. And then on top here we get another leveling layer truncating this dumping. Again, more dump of combustion material. We stay outdoors. And then there is one more thing I want to show you in this sequence. And that's the top of the top thin section where we see something different going on. And I've actually never seen something like this in outdoors area. So we weren't completely sure if this is actually outdoors or indoors. We get a very thin stratification of sediment and of organic lenses. But these are actually continuous bands of wood or bark. So this is looking like very gradually built up walking surfaces. And we've counted at least 21. So we think we have at least 21 individual walking surfaces going on. Whether this is inside or outside, that's maybe something for the discussion. Or if you've ever seen something like this, we can talk about it a little bit more because we do have some channels going through. My time is up. So I'll just conclude with at the end, basically the whole sequence was really rapidly buried both in section 15 and in 25 by just a clean level layer of sediment. And potentially we could link this to the context of this ditch and rampard formation that you saw in the first historical plan where things really change in this environment. So to conclude, we have seen two very different sequences quite close to each other in an area that is typically not considered very interesting for these types of analyses. And it's actually well worth studying them. And it would be very interesting to compare these much more detailed or better understood sequences to what we're finding in the center of towns. And specifically in Ypres, it would be a very interesting comparison, for example, in the 12th century. Also to evaluate agriculture in towns, animal husbandry in towns, different functional aspects. And as I said, we still want to do or need to do some additional analyses. For example, look at the fight list in the 10 sections to determine the crops. Look at granulometry and also maybe do some elemental analyses to determine how fertile the soils were and really strengthen our hypotheses of these agricultural layers. So that was it. Thank you very much for your attention.