 Well, my talk is not about climate change in itself, but it's actually about the consequences of climate change, one of the consequences, and that is sea level rise and adaptations to sea level rise in the past, because in the Northern Netherlands, and in the Netherlands as a whole, we are dealing with relative sea level rise since the start of the Holocene, it's caused by melting of the ice sheets on Scandinavia, and that's why our country is subsiding. So my research area is in the Northern Netherlands, and that's known as the Turb region. This was Saltmarsh region, all the Greenish parts were Saltmarsh, you also find them in North-Western Germany and on the coast of Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark, and the people lived in these areas on artificial dwelling mounds, these are all the small dots as you can hopefully see, well there are actually thousands of them in this coastal area. Now there are many words for these artificial dwelling mounds in this area, but the word Turb has become most used in international usage show, I will use that here as well. So I will concentrate on the Northern Netherlands because that's where my research is focusing on, and habitation in this area started around 650 BC. What was a Turb, what did a Turb look like, well this is an 18th century painting of the Turb of Asinger. Arrow indicates where it's found. Habitation started here at around 500 BC and you see it's quite a nice shallow hill and you wouldn't take it for an artificial dwelling mound at all because it's quite large. In the 19th century it was discovered that these turbs consist actually of very fertile soil and that was the start of a large scale destructive phase of commercial quarrying of the fertile turb soil and it was shipped inland to as manure for sandy and pity soils. As a side effect it became very quickly clear that these were not natural hills at all of course, but these were totally human made from the bottom to the top. Well the quarrying resulted in many finds and also in excavations. One of the most famous excavations in this area conducted in the 1920s and 1930s where the excavations in the Turb of Asinger carried out by our famous professor van Given. And as you can see there's excellent preservation of organic remains in the lower parts. These are from the Iron Age. We have a lot of well preserved remains of houses as you can see here and we are looking here at the Turb section through the Turb. Well this actually of course wetlands archaeology. These are wetlands conditions and that's why we have such excellent preservation. The Turb of Asinger looks like this now it's quite different from the nice hill that you saw in the painting. What we see here is a Turb remainder. You see that in the center where the arrows indicate parts that are still standing. And there is a large leveled area to the right and the left. All the meadows were originally part of the Turb but these were levels. And these leveled areas are called in Turb archaeology Turb souls. So these are the lower parts of Turbs you can still find. Remains of deeper features in this area. And what we also have is these escarpments that are the steep sides along the Turb Remainers and these are excellent for very efficient excavations. And we have had a lot of them in the past decade or so. I will show you one of them. This is an excavation carried out in the Turb of Anjum 2006. Well this is a very long escarpment as you can see and the Turb soul and this escarpment was cleaned resulting in this very nice Turb section of 120 meters long which gives you of course a very nice inside in the structure of the Turb and its development. The results of commercial Corian were not only negative of course we have a large scale destruction of the archaeological record but also archaeological research in the Turb region started at the time. Corian resulted in many many dateable finds. There are now the collections of the museums in the northern elements and these provide a very good overview of habitation history in this area. We also have an early introduction of ecological research. Already in the 1920s RPO Botanical Research started here, pioneers were working on it, zoology, forgiveness of zoologists himself, and zoology was also part of research and excavators had an active interest in the rate of relative sea level rights. Well that botanical research made it very clear that this was a salt marsh environment until medieval dike building started here in the 11th century and geological research made it clear that sedimentation had continued while during habitation but we find a lot of sediment layers against the outside of turbs and that of course makes it clear that there were regular inundations during habitation and to conclude that's what they concluded already in the 1920s turbs are a technology kind of technology that makes habitation in this rather extreme natural environment possible. Van Given had also an interest in relative sea level rights and he calculated the rate of sea level rise by comparing the elevation of the turb souls with sediments around the turbs and this graph shows this rate of sedimentation for the turb of Asinger you see levels of the level of salt marsh under dated layers over time between the 5th century BC on the left and the 12th century AD on the right and he calculated that relative the rate of relative sea level rise was about four to five centimeters per century well that was not quite correct but not far off the truth actually then after about 1940 nothing much happens in turb archaeology until the 1990s when a new interest started with the excavations in Vijnaldum you may have heard of them one of the focus is not the only one but one of the focus is still on landscape on the relation between human evocation and landscape between culture and nature because the salt marsh is still renown as a natural phenomenon it's the most natural landscape we have in the Netherlands but when you look at it closely it's becomes very clear that it has developed because of human intervention and at the same time human interpretation in this area existed thanks to the natural environment so we call this development we like to call it the synanthropic salt marsh so it's a close relation between the development of culture and nature in this area this new focus is also a geologist is always taking part in our excavations and this is resulted in a series of biographic maps which make the habitation history of this area insightful i show you two of these maps one from 500 BC one from AD 100 all the green areas are salt marshes and salt marsh riches along the coast these are the higher parts and all the black dots are turf settlements from these different periods salt marsh expansion expansion you can see that at AD 100 the salt marsh region was region had considerably increased compared to 500 BC that is in this area due to relative sea level rise and relative sea level rise in this area is about five to ten centimeters per century and in combination with and that is very important with a sufficient sediment supply the expansion of the salt marsh region in this period so between 500 BC and AD 100 was five to ten meters per year so that's certainly something that people were aware of and what we often see also can see on these maps is that there was considerable population growth this was a very successful type of habitation the first settlers came around 650 BC they settled on the high salt marsh at the beginning and they did not always apply heathening layers in this period but that very soon changed in the second phase heathening layers were applied in the form of small platforms and they also settled on the salt marsh riches along the coast that had silted up to the level of only a middle marsh which is flooded up to 50 days a year these platforms are no more than 40 to 100 centimeters high which must be the level of the highest extreme high water level they expected and this apparently worked because we never find or hardly ever find sedimentation layers on top of that we do find them against the sides of these platforms and that's also because the salt marsh area was quite fast it had an enormous capacity for water storage or flooding water could flow out over these large areas and did not rise to very high levels well these first platforms grew together by intentional heathening layers and expanding extension layers and on these then sedimentation continued water levels rose and new platforms were made and new houses were built and this process was repeated again and again and over time about 2,000 turbs at least 2,000 turbs were built this way in this area and it has very small house turbs and very large village turbs of course these platforms living on these platforms must have been quite frightful events during storm searches and there were requirements to these platforms of course they were not supposed to sec the houses had to have a firm foundation and erosion was to be prevented and that was done with very simple available materials in this area in the first place salt marsh turbs salt marsh salt and animal dung and sometimes water but that was not used very often animal dung may seem a strange choice but they had a lot of cattle and they had animal dung available and animal dung also serves as floor insulation we had some experiments with these materials on the left you see a photo of the excavation in Eisinger below these are south the structure character is the structure of salt marsh salt and on top you see a dung layer and dilated dung layer and we have some experiments with platform building you can see that on the right picture some examples this is from the excavation at Eisinger a salt platform entirely made of salts from the 5th century BC then a platform made of an encasement of salt marsh filled in with dung and an extension of dung on the side and this was a structure that survived for a very long time also in the 8th century in in the lower picture you see the same structure but filled in with salts and this is a very nice one from Neil Waden various faces on top of each other starting with a core of salts and then several dung layers on top of now my conclusions are that the Dutch are of course known as fighters against the sea but in this phase and first 1500 years of terp habitation they did not fight the sea but they rather adapted to it and they were profiting profiting from sea level rise of course a moderate sea level rise terp habitation was a successful way of living there for over 1500 years and not just unimportantly we think that this technology may still be useful now in low-lying coastal areas thank you for your attention