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Castles are part of an extensive infrastructure consisting of outer wards, artisanal buildings, defensive structures, roads, ports and farmsteads: The Castle Landscape. In England it is a common research practice to involve the landscape during castle research, but in the Netherlands the focus used to be on the main castle and not its landscape.
To understand the castles position a holistic, interdisciplinary approach should be used using historical sources, archaeology, remote sensing and using a combination of different geophysical techniques. In the Netherlands this is a new innovative way of doing castle research and is now part of a PhD study.
The research area is the province of North-Holland (Netherlands) and is an important part of the 13th century county ship of Holland. During that era a lot of castles were built as part of a defensive ring of fortresses to suppress the West-Frisians.
The presented case is the spin-off a PhD research and includes a 13th century castle, the Middelburg (Alkmaar), the smallest fortress within the defensive structure. This archaeological cold case from 1942 is reinvestigated using multiple geophysical techniques, renewed extensive historical-archaeological research (including WW2-aerial photography) on a larger scale and the interdisciplinary interpretation of the data. Results showed that the castle was at least three times bigger and had a different function. It wasn’t just a fortress, it was a medieval distribution center, complete with harbor and other functions and not just a military stronghold.
This PhD researches other similar 13th castles in this area using the same interdisciplinary large scale approach to prove that the meaning of these castles needs to be redefined. Applying this approach on Dutch castle research in general will lead to better understanding of the medieval castle and will make it possible to compare with similar castles in international context.

EAA2021: Abstract

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