Predictive Modelling in Dutch Archaeology, Joining Forces
H. Kamermans, M. Wansleeben, Juan Antonio Barceló, Iván Briz i Godino, Alba Barat Vilà · Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen · 1999
The Netherlands is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. More than 15 million people live in an area, measuring 41.526 km^. This is a density of 370 inhabitants, per km^. Spain, a country 12 times as large, only has 2.5 times as many inhabitants; that gives a density of 77 inhabitants per km^. This means that the population density of the Netherlands is almost 5 times that, of Spain. So many people, in such a small country, means a lot of intrastructural interventions, in the Dutch landscape. The result is that every year, roughly 1 % of the country, is under development. The fact, that the landscape is changing so rapidly, has a devastating effect on the archaeological record. In the last 40 years, more than 30% of the archaeological information, in Dutch soil, has been lost, without it having been looked at, by archaeologists (Groenewoudt, et al., 1994). Archaeologists working in Cultural Research Management (CRM) are doing what they can to protect the archaeology that is left, and to record and study what is threatened by demolishing. Not only CRM archaeologists are doing this. In the Netherlands, we have the unique situation, that almost all academic research is done, as rescue archaeology. So much is threatened and destroyed, that academic archaeologists are trying to answer most of their research questions, with rescue archaeology.