AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS—Dutch News reports that maritime archaeologist Yftinus van Popta has detected traces of four settlements in the Noordpoostpolder, an area to the northeast of Amsterdam flooded by the Zuiderzee in the late thirteenth century. It had been previously suggested that the bricks, bones, and pottery found in the area had fallen from passing ships. Van Popta pointed out that the objects date from the eleventh through thirteenth centuries A.D., but shipping did not begin to pass through the area until A.D. 1250. He plans to continue to look for remains of the villages, named Marcnesse, Nagele, Fenehuysen I, and Feneguysen II, with the help of old maps and other historical source materials. “We have found a lost piece of the Netherlands,” he said. To read about a sixteenth-century Dutch shipwreck, go to "Spring Boards."