Rokin Metro Station Archaeology Display

Museum · Rokin (Centrum)Amsterdam,Netherlands

Some 9,500 objects dredged from the Amstel while the metro was dug, cased beside the escalators of a working Amsterdam station.

The Rokin archaeology display holds about nine and a half thousand objects pulled out of the bed of the Amstel, and not one of them was put there on purpose. Between 2003 and 2012 the river was drained and dug out to sink the metro line, and the city's archaeologists went through the spoil. They recovered 697,235 items in all: keys, pins, knives, coins, clay pipes, cutlery, shoe buckles, mobile phones. A river ran through the middle of the city for centuries and people dropped things into it the whole time. The selection on show fills two long glass cases beside the escalators, eighty-four panels in all, sorted into ten themes of city life such as light, games and communication. Nothing was picked because it was important, so a medieval dagger sits near a 1990s collector's disc, and a stone arrowhead near a tram ticket. There are no labels under the individual objects; every find is photographed and described in a public online catalogue instead. The cases stand inside a working metro station.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Keep away from the morning and evening rush — at those hours the hall is full of people walking through, and there is nowhere to stand still in front of the glass without being in somebody's path.
See it while passing through, not as a special trip — the cases sit inside a working station, and reports differ on whether you can reach them without a transport card.
Hunt for the newest things, not the oldest — a tear-gas grenade fired in 1980 and 1990s collector’s discs sit alongside medieval knives, because the river took everything equally.
Look at the street you came down — Rokin is a filled-in stretch of the Amstel, and the tunnel below follows the river's old channel, which is why the finds are concentrated under this stretch.

Things to do

1
Ride down slowly and commit to one panel
Do not walk down the escalator. Stand on it, pick a single panel as it comes level with you and stay with that one. Each holds hundreds of small objects in rows, and the only way to see anything at all is to give up on the whole case and look at one square of glass.
2
Find something you still use today
Work along a panel until you hit something still in use today: a house key, a spectacle frame, a comb, a coin. Then look at what sits beside it, which may be four hundred years older and made for exactly the same job. That pairing is the entire argument of the display.
3
Look at the track wall from the platform
Go down to the platform and look at the wall on the far side of the rails. Thirty-three of the finds are cut into stone mosaic panels there, at a size readable from across the tracks: a pipe bowl, a knife, a shoe. They are the same small things from the cases, enlarged.