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Fragmenten uit de rijke wereld van de archeologie
Jelle Schokker
Ans Gotink
Wietske Prummel2018, Jaarverslagen van de vereniging voor Terpenonderzoek 99
The history of a little cabinet full of flint stones and the man behind. Stone tools are an important area of research in archeology. Very often they are the only artefacts that can tell us something about the people who lived shortly after the Ice Age. Nowadays we can use lists and figures of particular types of tools which can be related to specific cultures of the Stone Age. But this has not always been the case. Amateur archeologists have played an important role in recognizing the existence of mesolithic and late-palaeolithic cultures in the Netherlands. Some of them were real pioneers and are related to the discovery of cultures. Since 2003 the Noordelijk Archeologisch Depot (NAD), Nuis, is the official depot for archeological finds in the northern Netherlands. Many collections of stone tools, mostly flint artefacts, were brought together there. Amateur archeologists play an important role in identifying and describing these artefacts. There are different push and pull factors for amateur archaeologists to start collecting stone artefacts. A good example was Piet Houtsma (1915-2006) from Waskemeer (province of Friesland, Netherlands). His career as an amateur archaeologist started in 1947, when he found his first flint artefact not far from his home. It was identified as an artefact from the Hamburg Culture, a so called krombeksteker (burin-bec). The artefact was put away by Houtsma in a chest of 13 drawers, a little cabinet, which was later on filled with many other flint artefacts from all the sites where he found material from the Stone Age. When writing this article, this artefact was identified as a Creswell point. That is remarkable, because it must have been the first find of the Creswell culture in the province of Friesland. It is not surprising that he did not recognize this artefact as a Creswell point. At the time there were only some finds of this culture known from the province of Drenthe. Houtsma was a secondary-school teacher, but in his spare time he attended lectures in archeology at the Biological-Archaeological Institute at the University of Groningen (BAI) and participated in official excavations in Friesland in the period 1951-1966. The excavation of the important Creswell site of Siegerswoude in 1962 impressed him most. He may be considered an important amateur archeologist in the province of Friesland. His inheritance consists of a collection of well documented flint artefacts of several Stone Age cultures, a beautiful Creswell point and ... a beautiful little cabinet.
