The sites of Wezep and Oldebroek (province of Gelderland, Netherlands)

Some time ago a paper was published by Brouwer (1954) on the geological interpretation of a vertical section through Pleistocene deposits near the village of Wezep in the northeastern corner of the province of Gelderland, in the central part of the Netherlands. The exact locality¹, known locally as the ""Moordenaarshoek"" (murderer’s corner), is situated on a heath along the edge of a pine forest, which grows on the lower slopes of the northeastern tip of the great Pleistocene pressure ridge or moraine along the western border of the valley of the river Yssel. The locality was described for the first time by Bursch, Florschütz and van der Vlerk (1938) who made an excavation there on the instigation of the late Colonel Mallinckrodt, an ardent amateur archaeologist. It was believed that the numerous flint objects which could be found in a peculiar kind of boulderclay there and at other localities in the neighbourhood, might be interpreted as artefacts of a primitive, somewhat Clactonian, type; a belief which was also accepted by the present author until some five years ago. With the object of collecting more data on these somewhat enigmatic phenomena², an excavation at approximately the same locality as that described by Bursch, Florschütz and van der Vlerk was made in the autumn of 1948 by the Biologisch-Archaeologisch Instituut of Groningen University (director Professor A. E. van Giffen) under supervision of Dr. A. Bohmers and the present author. Thanks to the energetic help of the late Colonel Malunckrodt two other localities, situated more to the West, on the Oldebroek artillery range, were also excavated. Here again the same flint objects, interspersed in either gravel and coarse sands, or in a loam comparable to that found at Wezep, were recovered. The layer of loam at one of the two Oldebroek localities was found to be much thinner than that encountered at Wezep, although not differing from it in any other aspect.