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Prehistory of Belgium and the Netherlands
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There were tribes who buried their dead in hollowed-out tree trunks, others who cremated them and interred the urns containing their ashes. Age after age sent waves of migration from east to west, as if the tide of humanity were as irresistibly drawn toward the sea as the sea toward the land. Hitler's invasion of Northwest Europe is the latest upsurge of that eternally undulating human ocean.
It is not true, then, that dead men tell no tales. These prehistoric dead are better witnesses than the living. It is less easy to prove from biological traits of the present-day Dutch that prehistoric life in the Low Countries was a melting pot of races. Still, it is evident that the Dutch nation is, racially, not a homogeneous whole. The large majority, no doubt, is of Germanic origin, but there is an amazing variety within that stock. The Hollander of the low polder region in the west is a different type from the peasant in the Achterhoek, which is that part of the province of Gelderland that is closest to the German border. The Brabanter and Limburger, in the south, show small resemblance to the people of Friesland, and the Zeelander, again, is a type apart.
These differences are not due to variety in environment. The ramification of the stock is not a recent process, but a tenacious survival of prehistoric diversity. The Dutch in the north are Frisians, those in the east Saxons, those in the west and south Franks, and the marked differences among them are inherited traits that divided them no less distinctly when they first appeared upon the scene of history. They all speak some variety of the Germanic language—to be more specific, of that branch of it which the linguists call West Germanic.
It is impossible, of course, to draw sharp demarcation lines between them. They have mingled along their common boundaries, creating transition groups that bear the marks of Frisian and Saxon, of Saxon and Frank, of Frank and Frisian origin.
Remnants of another race are living among these Dutchmen of Germanic background. They belong to the Alpine or Kelto-Slavic stock, which inhabited the Low Countries before they were invaded by the Germanic tribes. In the Zeeland isles, where they were safe from hostile raids behind ramparts of turbulent water, they escaped extinction or absorption, and it is there that one still finds a type of people strikingly different from their longheaded, blond, and blueeyed fellow countrymen. They are dark-haired, dark-eyed, less tall than the Frisians and the Franks, and brachycephalic.
Among the Dutch it is the popular belief that rape and seduction of Zeeland girls by Spanish soldiers were of common occurrence during the Eighty Years' War, and that a Mediterranean strain was thus instilled into the stock. But modern science has measured the skulls and studied the pigments of thousands of blond and dark-haired Netherlanders, and these features have revealed to the biologists that in the darkeyed people of Zeeland an ancient race survives that in other parts of the Low Countries lost its entity by absorption in the stock of the Germanic invaders. South of the Rhine and the Maas, in the provinces of Limburg and Brabant, the effects of this absorption are still noticeable in a shorter stature and darker pigments than are found farther north in the Netherlands. A similar modification of the characteristic Germanic traits can be observed when one travels cross country from the North Sea coast in an easterly direction, the Saxons along the German border combining the short skull of the Alpine race with the blond hair and the blue eyes of the Teutons.
Dutch is derived from an old Germanic word that meant people. The Anglo-Saxon missionaries were the first to refer to the language of the native tribes as the speech of the peoples, and by peoples they meant pagans, just as in Latin the plural gentes was used for the heathen. The new coinage passed from the reports of the missionaries into the chancelleries of the German Empire, and was finally adopted by the peoples themselves when their conversion to Christianity had emptied the word of its pagan implication. It proved a useful term, for it gathered the many tribal dialects under one head, and marked them the common speech of the people as distinct from Latin, the language of the church.
To describe the prehistory of Belgium and the Netherlands, and to give it the place it deserves in the general European picture, means nothing less than considering the prehistory of all Western and Northern Europe. Practically, all cultural tendencies and all civilizations which characterized this part of the world in prehistoric times can be found--sometimes very attenuated, it is true--in our regions. This results more from the geographical position of the Low Countries than from their physical aspect or their natural wealth. The whole area--except the fertile zone in central Belgium and Dutch Limburg--was indeed at that period not very attractive from a settler's point of view: the rather sterile Ardennes highlands, covered with dense forests, the sandy soils and the marshy lowlands continually threatened by disastrous floods, formed the bulk of the territory. The subsoil, too, was rather poor, at least in products which might have at, tracted prehistoric man. The exploitation of flint deposits alone gave rise to a certain amount of trade during neolithic times. But here no copper, no tin, no silver, no amber are to be found. It is only at the end of the protohistoric period that iron began to be industrially worked, while coal-mining comes much later still, during the Middle Ages. If the Low Countries are, at the present day, areas of intensive agriculture and very specialized industry--thus having become at the same time one of the gardens of Europe as well as extremely active industrial centres and, in consequence, having the world's densest population---this is due to the increasing activity of their inhabitants since the Middle Ages. In prehistoric times, nothing whatever pointed to such a development.
However, that so many successive cultures are to be found here, notwithstanding this poverty and inhospitable nature, is due above all to the geographical situation of our regions. The Low Countries form the western extremity of the great Baltic plain, where so many migrations and cultural movements coming from the north and the east faded out. It extends on both sides of the delta of three of the most important rivers of Western Europe, the Rhine, the Meuse and the Scheldt, which sometimes served as connecting links, sometimes as cultural barriers. The old primary formations of the Eifel and the Ardennes, relatively low and very much eroded, were but a negligible obstacle and have never prevented penetrations from the Rhineland or from Central Europe. The valleys of the Moselle and of the Meuse allowed an easy access to the south. More to the west, no natural barrier exists between central and lowland Belgium and northern France. Last of all, communications with the British Isles were no more difficult. During the whole of the Palaeolithic Period and part of the Mesolithic, a land-bridge existed between that country and the Continent, so that on both sides of the Channel similar or closely related cultures are to be found. But even after the sea had separated one from the other, maritime relations between Great Britain and our coastal plain remained easy, and numerous contacts, cultural movements, even migrations--from east to west, or from west to east--have strengthened relations between the two countries.
For these reasons, the Low Countries have from the very beginning formed a natural crossroad, a turn-table between East and West, North and South Europe. Thanks to the passing and the intersecting of the main roads followed by men and ideas, migrations and invasions, the Low Countries, notwithstanding their relatively small area, formed already in prehistoric times a sort of synthesis of Europe, just as is the case now.
Today, enclosed by France, Great Britain and Germany, all three nations of great political, economic and cultural importance, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg present an undeniable unity, much stronger than the superficial economic and customs arrangement known as Benelux. This unity is much more apparent to foreigners than to the inhabitants of these countries themselves. These are much more conscious of the profound differences which separate them in many important points of culture, tradition, language, religion, economics. Our countries are not only divided by political frontiers, but also by the linguistic frontier (which runs through Belgium) between Romance and Germanic languages, and by the religious frontier (which runs through the Netherlands) between Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions. In, side our communities there thus exists a very unstable and fluid equilibrium between centripetal and centrifugal forces, which, now broken, then re-established again, has resulted in successive periods of political and cultural unity or violent opposition. The origins of this state of affairs, the reasons which explain these antitheses and these unitary trends, must be sought in remote times, and quite a few of them probably date already from the prehistoric period. The effects of this swing from couaboration between North and South to violent opposition and back again are felt to this day.
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