Special Brabant finds and objects cannot only be found in museum depots and archives. The soil archive also often contains secret treasures. As shown during an excavation near Esch. There, archaeologists find a piece of old wood: a plank of three meters long. But is that so special?
The excavator carefully scrapes the first sods of grass from the ground. Then it slowly goes deeper and deeper. “Stop!”, archaeologist Mette van de Merwe shouts. “I think we’re there.” A wooden plank is uncovered by hand in the muddy clay and sand, as can be seen in the fourth episode of Klokken van Brabant on Brabant+.
But what exactly is it? Mette: “We currently think it is a dugout canoe. But we must first remove the wood quickly and preserve it, because now that it comes into contact with oxygen for the first time in centuries, it can quickly fall apart and then we will have nothing left to investigate further.”
For the first time in centuries? Then it must be very old. “That is possible, but dugout canoes were made in our region from eight thousand BC until the Middle Ages. So we cannot say anything about that yet. We have to study that further.”
The new season of Klokken van Brabant can now be seen on Brabant+. In this series, historian Patrick Timmermans looks for the stories behind special objects in the depots of Brabant museums, archives and other collections.
How old is the bronze spearhead of the guild in Oirschot? What are those strange stones doing in the park of Heeswijk Castle? And what happened to the English pilot Charles Hall, who flew over Brabant during the Second World War? To find answers to these and other questions, Patrick visits various experts and other stakeholders. And so together they arrive at new insights and surprising results.
The plank, which indeed resembles a kind of primitive boat, made from a hollowed-out tree trunk, goes into a container and is then prepared and fixed in the nearby Prehistoric Museum in Boxtel. But that will take weeks.
So we still have time to visit Yvonne Lammers, head of the Prehistoric Village in Eindhoven. Here you can go back in time and see with your own eyes how such a canoe was made. By hand, with which tools, which type of wood was suitable, how long it took to make and how long such a boat would last: Yvonne knows the answer to everything. We hardly dare to ask, but… Yvonne: “Yes, you can come along for a ride.”
The age of the wood can be determined using modern techniques. For example, with so-called dendrochronological research. The annual rings of a tree trunk are measured and placed next to previously dated trees as a kind of barcode. But do we have enough wood to investigate such a unique signature? “There is also another technique: the C-14 method. All life on Earth contains carbon, which is slightly radioactive. By calculating the half-life you can roughly determine the age of an object,” Mette explains.
Will that work? You see it the fourth episode of Klokken van Brabant on Brabant+.