6.4 Reoccupation
The coastal area started to be reoccupied in the 5th century. Lanting and Van der Plicht (2010) argue that the Frisian coastal area was not reoccupied by immigrants from the Anglo-Saxon area, which is the traditional view, but by people from Groningen and Drenthe, areas which had not been abandoned. This is, however, not very likely. In the first place, the remaining population of the Groningen coastal area cannot have been numerous. It is well possible that people from the few inhabited terps started to colonize abandoned terps in the 5th century, but this cannot have been a large-scale phenomenon. In the second place, there are no indications that the population of Drenthe was large enough to fill the empty space of the entire coastal area. A ‘settlement’ like Midlaren-De Bloemert consisted of no more than one house per generation during the 4th and 5th centuries. Eelde-Groote Veen, where habitation ended around AD 400, probably was not any larger. Such settlements could not contribute much to the repopulation of the terp area. It therefore still seems most likely that a large part of the new settlers came from the traditional homelands of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’: the extensive coastal areas of Niedersachsen and Schleswig-Holstein.