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.
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