Summary. Two races of man in Zeeland In the province of Zeeland (the Netherlands) two groups of mediaeval graveyards have been investigated since 1854. Those of the first group were situated on the sea coast of the Island of Walcheren and contained row graves dating from about 700 until 870 A. D. Here 39 skulls were collected and measured. Of these individuals 33 were dolicho- or mesocranial, the index ranging from 71 up to 78. Two were hyperdolichocranial (index 67 and 68), four others brachycranial (index 80 up to 82). This population living on the Island of Walichrum (or Walicrum) visited by St Willibrord about 700 A.D. and certainly not very numerous, had economic relations with many parts of the world: the coins found in the graves or in the nearest neighbourhood range from Anglo-Saxon Engeland through France as far as Isfahan (Iran). The graves were destroyed by the sea; the skulls, formerly kept in a museum at Middelburg (Zeeland), were destroyed by fire in 1940 during World War II. W. Z. Ripley (1899, The races of Europe, p. 38) figured one of these skulls; the same skull and another one are figured here. The other group of graveyards, situated further up the aestuary of the River Scheldt, were inundated 1530 A.D. This disaster stopped the burials. Only Reimerswaal, a little town on the Scheldt, lying as an island within its walls, remained inhabited until 1631. From these graveyards more than 250 skulls were collected and measured. Among these only 23 had a breadth-length index below 80. The frequency distribution of the cranial index shows two (or three) maxima exactly as Kappers found in so many brachycephalic populations of Europe and western Asia. In this part of the aestuary the Duinkerken II (or post Roman) trans gression had swept away all earlier settlements. The town and the villages to which the graveyards belonged are recorded from the thirteenth century onwards and may very well have existed earlier, but not before 800 A.D. The first mediaeval settlers probably made their livelihood mainly by sheep farming and salt making (both were, curiously enough, special activities of the brachycephalic bell-beaker people of western Europe in the beginning of the second millennium B.C.). Later on also cattle and pig breeding and agriculture could be practised. I guess immigration of brachycephalics, at an unknown date after 800 A.D., but even if we admit brachycephalization of originally dolicho- or mesocephalic settlers, the existence of such a highly brachycephalic population about 1500 A.D. can be explained only by a long lasting genetic, geographical or social isolation which are not well under stood. The present paper is meant as an introduction to the treatise on some more skulls from the latter region by dr A. J. van Bork-Feltkamp. 20

Tijdschriftenbank Zeeland

Archief | 1965 | | pagina 22