Below the Surface

More than 700,000 archaeological finds in nine years digging on the North-South metro line: the work on the new Amsterdam subway brought a wealth of historical objects to the surface. With Below the Surface you literally take a dive into the history of Amsterdam.

Using a timeline, the website belowthesurface.amsterdam takes you along thousands of finds. Scoll from the year 2005 to more than 100,000 years ago and discover the most extraordinary artefacts that have been excavated: from a pistol to a coastal denture, from a gullet dagger to a crocodile jaw. Every discovery tells a story. In addition to the timeline, there are plenty of other opportunities to browse through these finds, such as location, use and material. But beware: it is very addictive and you continue to discover special objects. For experts we built a fine-meshed search option to find information that is more scientific in nature.

Besides browsing the archaeological findings extensively on your PC at home, you can also view 10,000 artefacts in showcases along the escalators of the Rokin metro station, on which more background information can be found via belowthesurface.amsterdam. To zoom in on the various finds online, we used the Micrio platform we developed ourselves.

The 700,000 archaeological finds from the North-South line can not only be viewed passively. Get started and create your own online overview with favourite artefacts on the Below the Surface website! You can add each find in the overview to a personal display that you can design and then publish.

Finally, the website belowthesurface.amsterdam also offers extensive background information about the archaeological project of the North-South metro line. The design and execution of the excavations have been further elaborated with attention to the special character of the river Amstel as an archaeological site, the specific objectives of the research on Damrak and Rokin and the digital processing of the hundreds of thousands of finds.