Urban Farming and Ruralisation in The Netherlands (1250-1850) Unravelling farming practice and the use of (open) space by synthesising archaeological reports using text mining

Urban farming is about food production for and by town dwellers. Small-scale farming is known to have been a feature of medieval and later towns from documentary evidence, and an historical and geographical framework for urban farming in the Netherlands is offered in (Chapter 2).
The topic of urban farming has nevertheless remained relatively underexposed in terms of archaeological research. This study surveys archaeological reports from commercially funded urban excavations in the Netherlands carried out in the period from 1997 up to and including 2017.
The volume presents evidence for urban farming in Dutch towns between 1250 and the nineteenth century. The data has been assembled and analysed using text mining. This digital technique has been used to search for keywords that describe archaeological correlates of urban agriculture, such as 'layer of arable soil', 'orchard', 'animal grave', 'fruit tree'. A total of 1380 reports were examined, generating data on historic farming in 84 towns (Chapter 3).
Most of the data relate to animal husbandry (31%), closely followed by horticulture (27%) and more general or unspecified rural activities (21%). Arable farming is less represented in the data (16%). Surprisingly, orchards are not much in evidence, and fish farming is a rarity. The scale and extent of commercial urban excavations in different regions has influenced the amount of data that is available. For towns in Zeeland, Limburg, Friesland and Drenthe comparatively little archaeological data is available and this makes comparisons with patterns of farming in other regions difficult (Chapter 4).
Most indications of local animal husbandry are small-scale and incidental (Chapter 5). Primary evidence of animal husbandry within towns can nevertheless be found in the form of complete skeletons of stillborn, new born or diseased animals. There is abundant evidence for arable farming and horticulture but this fluctuates over time (Chapter 6). When the indicators for arable farming decrease in the late Middle Ages a corresponding increase can be seen in evidence for horticulture in peripheral urban areas.