ABSTRACT
The chapter starts with the three great rivers that form the Dutch Delta: the Rhine, Maas and Scheldt. Each river contributes to a set of five major estuaries that in history were connected to North Sea tides. Closing all but two estuaries started in the early 1930s and was completed by the Delta Works between the 1970s and the 1990s. Water management in the Netherlands is likened to a control panel that carefully controls river discharge, distribution of flow, storage of water and coastal defense against storm tides. The system also controls saltwater intrusion into groundwater, especially for agricultural lands. Importantly, it also controls water levels suitable for navigation in its waterways and canals. The oldest record of the Low Countries originated in Roman times, when the River Rhine formed the north-eastern boundary of the empire towards Germania. Fortifications were built along the left bank from Cologne to Katwick at the historic mouth of the river. Utrecht and Nijmegen are mentioned as places where Romans crossed the Rhine to subdue Frisian and other Germanic tribes. Due to early climate change and the military defeat of Roman garrisons, the Low Countries became depopulated. North Sea tides created large incisions into the land, creating estuaries and connecting inland bodies of water to the open sea. Important are the layers of peat deposit that accumulated on top of boulder clay left after the ice age; they are important because to this day, layers of peat form the subsiding foundation of cities in Holland. Human life returned around 800 to settle and cultivate the land by draining the peat moss through canals and extracting peat for fuel and the production of salt. Early town settlements started in the 12thcentury, generally on top of raised ground or mounts. Later a form of settlement emerged that took advantage of dikes or constructed levees. The so-called “dam” typology is characteristic of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. It is the place of a sluice gate that blocks high water from entering cultivated land when closed and discharge of water when open. The chapter ends with a discussion of cartography, a discipline that evolved in Portugal and Italy and became an essential tool in Low Countries for the reclamation of land and the building of polders, canals, dikes and towns that formed behind such dikes.
