EUROPE’S LOST WORLD – THE RE-DISCOVERY OF DOGGERLAND
6th October 2008
Prof. Vincent Gaffney
Professor Gaffney opened our eyes to a lost landscape under the North Sea.He started
by recounting the speculations of earlier workers based on tantalising clues. In
1913, C. Reid, in his book Submerged Forests, suggested the presence of formerly
habitable land, based on the submerged peat and tree stumps observed at very low
tides at various places around the coastline of the North Sea. In 1931, a chunk
of peat dredged up by a trawler in the southern North Sea contained a piece of worked
antler - a harpoon point; the peat contained pollen, indicating mixed woodland. In
1936, Graham Clarke published Mesolithic Europe, a synthesis of the accumulating
archaeological and environmental evidence from around the North Sea basin. He suggested
the submerged land had been a central part of the hunter-gatherer Mesolithic culture,
while Britain was still joined to the continent (c. 9000 - 6400 BC). More recently,
Bryony Coles, in a thought-provoking article, “Doggerland: a Speculative Survey”
(Proc. Prehist. Soc. 64, 1998, 45-81), using the results of recent geological and
Quaternary studies on ice retreat and changing sea levels, provided speculative reconstructions
of the topography, river systems, coastline, vegetation and fauna of what she called
‘Doggerland’. But the Mesolithic land surface has been scoured and has had sediment
deposited on it by tides and currents, and, of course the details of the landscape
remain invisible under 50m or more of water.
However, the work of Professor Gaffney and his co-workers at the HP Visual and Spatial
Technology Centre of the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Birmingham
have changed all that! In recent decades, the southern North Sea has been heavily
exploited for oil, gas and aggregates and consequently, the seabed and underlying
strata has been mapped in great detail by marine geophysicists. Remarkably, Petroleum
Geo-Services have donated more than 22,000 square kilometres of marine seismic data,
collected and analysed at the cost of millions of pounds, to the archaeologists at
Birmingham. The seismic data allows one to see through recent sediments to the underlying
geology. Using sophisticated computer software, the Birmingham group have been able
to reconstruct the original Holocene (c. 8000 - 6400 BC) land surface representing
Mesolithic Doggerland. There is even the prospect of mapping the land surfaces,
such as that inhabited by Late Palaeolithic hunters of c. 20,000 BC. “Tunnel valleys”
have been detected under later overlying sediments, which are interpreted as drainage
channels under the ice-sheet of the last Glacial Maximum (c. 18,000 BC).
It has been possible to identify rivers with tributaries, wet-land areas and low
undulating hills on the Mesolithic land surface. Funding from the Marine Aggregates
Levy Sustainability Fund has enabled the team to expand the project and to develop
Virtual Reality computer models, which show the landscape in 3D and perspective views.
Using pollen information from the few cores available it has been possible to clothe
the landscape with the probable contemporary vegetation. The visual presentation
of the Holocene landscape was very impressive.
Professor Gaffney emphasized that this was just the start. There is a lot more seismic
data to analyse. More cores with pollen are required to allow modelling of the changing
landscape from tundra to grassland to forest, in the hope of predicting likely areas
of Mesolithic settlement. Focused sea-bed investigations may produce hard evidence
to verify the computer models.
Bob Bruce
