Digging the Dutch Mountains: Recent Work by Leendert Louwe Kooijmans.

Abstract

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] The 'mountains' in the western part of the Netherlands are no longer there. But at the end of the Pleistocene, the combined effects of river sedimentation and the aeolian reworking of these sediments created an undulating landscape with the highest riverdunes rising to some 10 m above the surrounding landscape. These dunes, or donken, protruded as islands within an increasingly flat landscape that developed during the early and middle Holocene as rising sea level led to the expansion of the North Sea and the retreat of the mouths of the rivers Meuse and Rhine, turning the former undulating landscape into a delta with extensive wetlands. Especially towards the end of the Mesolithic, and during the early phases of what was, on the higher and drier lands to the east, the Neolithic period, the donken became the refuges of hunter-gatherers.