Stone knives, scrapers and an arrowpoint out of the  neoliticum period

After my study at the "Bosbouw en Cultuurtechnische School" (forestry and artifical technics ,1971) in Arnhem, I became a  landscape architect in Noord-Limburg (south part of the Netherlands) There I worked on the construction of artificial landscape plans for many regions.

That was a lot of work in the countryside and I found a lot of prehistoric material. Till 1980 I have done this work.

The historical research of landscapes had my great interest. System ecology was part of the job and I was very interested in the meaning of that, for our daily life (the rotten timber in the forest has a function :-)  )

Speulder and Sprielderbos (Ermelo Putten) 1980 -1989

After the job of "landscape builder", I became forest administrator of the oldest forest in the Netherlands on the North West Veluwe. In that time the interest for hardwood under the collaegues was still nil and I  started with my ideas about the planting of winteroak.

Beside that, I started in the old parts of the forest  "the knowledge of doing nothing", to give nature a change to follow his own way. Those ideas came from my landscape period and were accepted by my bosses.

Furthermore I liked the history of this old forest and discovered after a long search "the deelbeyl" (a hall-mark hammer), which was described for the first time in the regional law of farmers of 1548 (de malekeur).

In the illustrated Dutch magazine Reizen of the ANWB from 1986, number 6, my search is described in an excellent manner by George van Aken. The title of this article was "the forest of the dancing trees", with means that the trees are curved by negativ selection of hundreds of years.

From the Germanic time this forest was in hands of the surrounding farmers who managed that in the form of a community. Till the year 1798 the farmers had their own jurisdiction (bosmaalschap).

Timber exported from the forest, always was marked by the hall-mark hammer and thiefs with stolen timber were punished in an old fashion way by hacking off two fingers or a complete hand.

In the middle of the forest lies the smalll village "Drie". That village has been described for the first time in 700 a. chr. and was called Thri.

Thri was a Germanic forest god who had a lot of power in those years. Also in the neigbourhood there was the Sol hole (Solse gat) descend from ealier times. Also the Sol hole was a holy place for the Germans where they were praying to the sungod.

The name... Sol comes from Soleil what means sun, therefore the place where the sun was worshiped. So, a very old forest in the Netherlands with great importance for nation's history.

In the summer of 1989 I leaved the forest and I became an artist (painter). The hall-mark hammer was still in my possession but as a historically important object,I found that it had to be preserved for the community.

The museum "De tien malen" on the estate Schovenhorst in Putten seemed to me the right place for conservation and on 21 November 2001 I gave it as a grant to this museum.