In: J.C. Besteman, J.M. Bos, D.A. Gerrets, H.A. Heidinga & J. de Koning. The Excavations at Wijnaldum - Reports on Frisia in Roman and Medieval Times. Volume 1. A.A. Balkema/ Rotterdam/ Brookfield. pp 1- 16

Wijnaldum is a small village, built an an raised mound called ater p, in the north-western part of the province of Friesland, in the region which was called Westergo in the Middle Ages. It belongs ta the municipality of the nearby town of Harlingen, the seaport of the province. Like many villages in the countryside, in the second half of this century Wijnal- dum has lost most of the communal and economic functions that such places used to have in the past,1 a fate which was reinforced by the short distance ta Harlingen. The modest church, around which the main part of village is concentrated, symbolizes better days. As far as we know from written sources, the place has never played an outstanding role in the region. So, why introduce Wijnaldum here?

To the east of the village a row of serried, deserted terps, adjacent ta a few scattered farms along the Voorrijp road (Fig. 1), suggests however that the historical village as a nuclea- ted hamlet an the mast westerly terp was once preceded by 'another' Wijnaldum: an elongated settlement situated parallel to a stream called Ried (nowadays the Sexbierum canal). Indeed, these rather low terps, which far the greater part escaped levelling by commercial quarrying in the 19th and first half of the 20th century but are now threatened by modern agricultural practices, contain valuable archaeological information on a remote past of Wijnaldum from the Roman Period onwards, as was shown recently by the archae- ological research of one of them. Although Wijnaldum suffered a period of decline, if not of non-existence, in this 'prehistoric' past as well (in the Migration Period), its wealth and prosperity during the Early Middle Ages, especially during the 6th-8th centuries, do not fit the modest image of the later Wijnaldum at all. This Golden Age of Wijnaldum coinci- des with the period in which Frisia emerged as an important factor in Northwest- European economy and politics

In 1991 the village became 'big news' in the regional press: the seat of the legendary Frisian kings of the Dark Ages was claimed to have been discovered here by a team of archaeologists from the universities of Groningen and of Amsterdam..2 A booklet that was published shortly after by the excavators was less explicit about these kings, but its title:

track. Anyway, thousands of enthusiastic people visited the windy terp, called Tjitsma,4 east of the village where the three-year excavation campaign took place. Also in archaeo- logical circles the name of Wijnaldum aroused great expectations.

2 Although the excavation team did not go as far as Jan Zijlstra in connecting Wijnaldum to the legendary
Frisian king Finn, who plays a significant role in earlymedieval English poetry (Beowulf, the Finnburg frag-
ment, Widsith) as the treacherous hero who defeated and was defeated by the Danes, this Finn became a
sort of mascot of the excavation. Zijlstra assumes that the poets had replaced Win(wald), the real name of a
local Frisian 'king' after whom Wijnaldum could have been named, by the more familiar Finn for literary
reasons (Zijlstra 1990-1994, passim). Frans Herschend however put forward the hypothesis that the whole
story should be situated in the Danish-Jutish frontier zone of the 6th century. The real Finnburg could have
been an elite settlement like Dankirke in Jutland (Herschend 1997).

Now the time has come to be called to account scientifically: what is the archaeological truth about Wijnaldum? This volume contains the first reports on the excavation. One more volume will follow in the next few years. The articles deal with the sober archaeological reality, with various subjects like landscape reconstruction, the structure and periodicity of the settlement, pottery, glass, leather, broaches, coins, metal work, wood, botanical evidence, human remains etc. Although many exciting new results have been produced, it is too early yet to determine the full meaning of the site. In the present contributions kingship is hardly the issue, although Frisian aristocracy is explicitly or implicitly present in the background, for it is obvious that Wijnaldum was not an ordinary settlement, at least not in the 6th-8th centuries. How extraordinary and special it was cannot yet be said. The main problem is, and will probably be far a long time, the repre- sentativity of the site. Only a part of terp Tjitsma was excavated, so a very limited section of the settlement 'Wijnaldum' (i.e. the unit of the nine aligned terps) is known The stray finds from the other Wijnaldum terps, however interesting they may be, provide insuffi- cient information about supposed social and economic differentiation between the various parts of the settlement. And, as will be explained later on, there are hardly any excavated settlements in the Frisian terp region as a whole with which to compare Wijnaldum. Although this lack is compensated to some extent by a huge quantity of finds from many terps that were quarried off in the first half of the century or were browsed recently by metal detectors, the place of Wijnaldum within the settlement system cannot yet be defined with certainty.

However this may be, the archaeological profit from this excavation is enormous. It has not only produced a refined chronology of many artefact categories (which at least made many archaeologists happy), but - more importantly - it also provided a cross-section through the daily life of the people that lived here in the Frisian core area almost continuously from the 2nd till the 11th century. We were informed about their cultural traditions and roots, their surprisingly modest demands on housing in contrast to their wealth, the way they used the environment for a livelihood, the products of their artisans, the way they dealt with their dead and even about the DNA of some of them. Most impor- tant is the information on their extra-regional networks which was shown, for example, by coins, metal work, glass and huge amounts of imported pottery. One object, a precious brooch, though made in Friesland (perhaps at Wijnaldum), was manufactured by a top-

Figure 1. Wijnaldum: the terp row to the east of the village. Only plots of arable land were selected for this survey, so no contour lines of the northern part of the village terp are presented. The location of the excavation at Tjitsma is indicated (after RAAP consultancy, Amsterdam).

artisan who probably had his training at some royal court in Anglo-Saxon England.5 This brooch, the major part of which was already found in the 1950s, was the direct induce- ment to the excavation and to the rumours about kingship.

In this contribution it will be explained why the excavation took place, which questions were asked and are to be asked, and how this research in the neglected core area of the Frisian realm led to the birth of a major research project on Dark Age Frisia as a whole.

The choice for what is euphemistically called 'protection ex-situ' was made for several reasons. In the first place, excavating the site was the best if not the only thing to do, for no law could prevent the farmer from ploughing his fields, and thus from destroying the upper layers of the terp, and no police force could be found to watch Tjitsma effectively. This 'defeat' could be compensated in a way by using this excavation to analyse the process of erosion by agrarian activities in this type of sites in general. In the second place - if not in the first place - research of a site like Wijnaldum was not only desirable but also necessary for scientific reasons. In Dutch archaeology, which nowadays is focused more on protecting sites for future generations than on the past itself, such considerations have become almost illegal. Archaeologists, however, are not in this world for the sole purpose of guarding the archaeological heritage, they are also obliged to rebuild the past and to tell about it. Therefore this opportunity to become informed about a central place in the core area of Frisian achievement could not be neglected. As will be elucidated below, Dutch archaeology has to make up arrears with respect to the Frisians, whose contribution to European history in the Early Middle Ages can hardly be overes- timated. The rise of Dorestad, for instance, cannot be understood without some know- ledge of what was going on in the terp region, especially in the province of Friesland, in Westergo and Oostergo.

The truth is that archaeological information about this region is astonishing defective. Although the Fries Museum at Leeuwarden contains one of the richest archaeological collections of the country, one of the best monographs ever written in Netherlands: P.C.J.A Boeles, Friesland tot de elfde eeuw. Zijn voor- en vroege geschiedenis, published already in 1927 (2nd, revised edition in 1951), deals with the archaeology of the province of Friesland, and modem settlement archaeology was invented, so to speak, in the terp region by A.E. van Giffen in the 1930s,6 the wave of settlement archaeology of the last decades has almost by-passed this area, especially Westergo and Oostergo. Dutch archae- ology can only partly be blamed for that, for the main reason for the archaeological silence in the region is the fact that there appeared to be no necessity to dig in the unchal- lenged and now legally protected remains of the terps. As a matter of fact there were some excavations,7 but the Biological Archaeological Institute at Groningen, which was in practice responsible for the archaeology of the northern provinces, never developed a diachronic research programme for the terp region as it did for the sandy province of Drenthe. Besides, due to the main interests at the time (environmental and subsistence issues, the provenance of the first settlers etc.), there was no special preferen-ce for the province of Friesland, i.e. Westergo and Oostergo, nor for the most intriguing period of Frisian history: the 'Golden Age' of the 6th-8th centuries in which these core regions must have contributed greatly to the Frisian achievement of the Dark Ages Although the volume of the Berichten van de Rijksdienst voor het Oudheidkundig Bodemonderzoek from 1965-1966, which contained a synopsis of the prehistory (H.T. Waterbolk), Roman

6 A.E. van Giffen's spectacular and exemplary excavations at Ezinge (province of Groningen) in 1923-1934
made, although the site was never fully published by him, a tremendous impression on international archae-
ology (see for instance Delvigne 1984). A revision of the interpretation of Van Giffen was recently published
by De Langen & Waterbolk (1989).