In Our Time - Doggerland

Episode Date: June 27, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the people, plants and animals once living on land now under the North Sea, now called Doggerland after Dogger Bank, inhabited up to c7000BC or roughly 3000 years before the beginnings of Stonehenge. There are traces of this landscape at low tide, such as the tree stumps at Redcar (above); yet more is being learned from diving and seismic surveys which are building a picture of an ideal environment for humans to hunt and gather, with rivers and wooded hills. Rising seas submerged this land as glaciers melted, and the people and animals who lived there moved to higher ground, with the coasts of modern-day Britain on one side and Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium and France on the other.With Vince Gaffney Anniversary Professor of Landscape Archaeology at the University of BradfordCarol Cotterill Marine Geoscientist at the British Geological SurveyAndRachel Bynoe Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of SouthamptonProducer: Simon Tillotson

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Hello, doger, German bite, Humber, Thames and Dover At no place in the Stone Age shipping forecast As they were areas of land, not sea And ideal habitats for human hunter-gatherers The highest point, Doggerbank, was the last to disappear, perhaps 7,000 years ago as ice sheets melted and the sea levels rose, and Stone Age residents took to the higher ground of Norfolk and the Netherlands. The submerged area is now known as Doggerland, and at low tide on the North Sea coast you can still see traces of tree stumps left by its ancient forests. With me to discuss Doggerland are Carol Cottrell, Marine Geoscientist at the British Geological Survey,

Rachel Beiner, Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Southampton, and Vincent Gaffney, anniversary professor of landscape archaeology at the University of Bradford. Vince Gaffney, can you clarify what's the extent of this submerged area that was once land? At the lowest glacial stand about 20,000 years ago, the sea level is about 120 metres lower than it is today. That meant that huge areas of coastal plain today were actually dry land. globally we're talking about an area perhaps the size of North America

within Europe perhaps 20% of the area of Europe was actually lost as seas rose and around Britain in the area we now know as dogland but also including the West Coast of Liverpool Bay Seven Estuary for instance

perhaps an area as large as the United Kingdom itself was lost Now, this area, we know very little about, and we're only just exploring the actual extent. We are not entirely certain about it. It's possible that, for instance, we have believed that areas up to the Norwegian trench to the east of the Shetlands were dry land,

but these may not have been so in the run up to inundation. It may be that perhaps 60, 70,000 square kilometres, were actually dry land. But for the sake of this programme, our idea of doggarland is sort of the space between a lot of the East Coast and Europe. We're talking about that space there. Are we talking about we call it doggar land?

Is it as big as Holland? Can you give us an idea of the size of it? It changed over time. As the seas rose after the last glaciation, it became smaller. The area in which perhaps most people are concerned with, is after about 10,000 BC, the point at which people would have been able

perhaps to walk from Yorkshire to Denmark, we'd have been talking about 60, 70,000 square kilometres of dry land. I know 60,000 or 70,000 kilometres means a lot to you. It doesn't mean a great deal to me. If you say something like Denmark or the Netherlands, I'm trying to get an idea for our listeners, how big this was. Well, if the international standard for lost lands

is approximately the Netherlands and a bit larger, that's about it. That's about it, good. So we're back down the Netherlands a bit large. Now, what was unique about this doggiland area? Was anything unique about it? It's an area that is interesting because it was certainly habitable and inhabited.

It would have been most convenient that if perhaps we could forget about it as archaeologists because it's so difficult to get to. But actually, the landscape itself may well have been an optimal area for human habitation. It may well have been an area, certainly, after 10,000 BC, where the densities of populations were greatest,

the resources were greatest, but the cultures that existed there, we knew very little about, and therefore they are important. So between about 10,000 BC and about 5,000 BC, can we talk in these enormous terms, there was a place there, and you've said it was, actually, I think it once said, you said it could have been a heartland of the economic,

heartland of that part of Europe? I think that wouldn't be hyperbole. Most of the areas around it, perhaps in Britain, which is how we write the history of the Mesolithic on the basis of the lands we knew well. They were the hinterland, the areas actually at sea, the coastal areas which had the greatest resources, the fish, the birds, the wetlands, which are so productive, may well have had the greatest concentration of populations. So these are the places, most of the places, most fertile for habitation. Yes. There was a British journalist.

Clement Reed, a British geologist, began to interest himself in this, about 1913. What took his interest? Why did he go there? Well, Clement Reed's a very interesting person. He was born in the 1850s. He was a great nephew of Michael Faraday,

a self-made man. He taught himself and got a job in the British Geological Survey. He was interested in pliocene plants, paleobotany, and the linkage between geology and climate. So it wasn't surprising that he was attracted to areas where you could see climate change in action. He himself, he wasn't the first person,

but he was well aware of the fact that below high water tides, there were Piedby forests, woodlands, stumps, at least. These were often called Nua's wood. They're obviously the results of biblical floods. And this court is eye and inspired them to consider the problems of what they meant. Was these reports from fishermen and sailors these woods and so on, did that take him there? Did he see them for himself? I mean, how did he get involved in the first place?

There had actually been reports of these things for a long time. There are historic quotes in the medieval period from the certainly the 16th, 17th century. in England. But throughout the 19th century, people had become aware of them and also the remains of fossil animals being trawled from the North Sea itself.

Thank you very much. Rachel Bano, a lot of the clues as I implied have come from fishing and later from oil exploration and so on. Let's seek to fishing with the trawlers. In the 1930s, there's a trawler called Kalinda, netted something which really pushed it,

research forward. Can you tell the listeners about that? Yes, so this was, it was a mesolithic harpoon and it came up from the motor vessel clinton, like you say, on the Lehman and Our Banks, which is just to the north of Norfolk. This was important because it's a beautiful find, a beautiful

artefact and the first probably the first reported archaeological artefacts from these areas. And so it was important because it meant that the archaeologists at the time went from seeing these areas as marine, as purely sea, to starting to engage with them in an archaeological way. So starting to think that we can, in fact, engage with these submerged terrestrial

landscapes and start to ask more questions about these. Can you tell us more about this harpoon? Well, the harpoon dates from the Mesolithic period. What does that mean? It was a period that Vince really is concentrating on at the moment, and it's in that last... We like years, aren't. How many years? It's from, yeah, about 9,000 years ago.

That'll do. Yeah. And this was within that last, most recent period of exposure. What was it made of? And how long was this? Antler, I believe. Yeah. Antler, I'm not sure how long it was.

It's a little bit younger than I'm used to dealing with. But, you know, I'd say probably, no, I'd be guessing. I think it's probably about 10, 15 centimetres or so. Was this the first and most important of many tools that had began to turn up there? Yes, I think so. So, I mean, a lot has been trawled up. You mentioned fishing at the start. And a lot has been trawled up from these areas,

including a vast amount of faunal remains, so animal bones, as well as stone tools, which have come up more recently through mostly through aggregate extraction. And it's really, for me, whilst the Kalinda harpoon is amazing and is brilliant, these tools are very important because they tell us about the incredible time day. depth that's associated with these submerged landscapes. So the story is much longer than simply the last exposure of them after the last glaciation, which, as Vince mentioned,

was at its maximum about 20,000 years ago. These actually stretched back the entire time we've had people living in Britain and northwest Europe, which at the moment is about a million years ago, based on current evidence from a cycle to Haynespa. And these tools tell you about them? Yes, exactly. So the tools, predominantly the faunal remains. And so we know that these landscapes were exposed repeatedly throughout that past million years.

We know that geologically. We know that because we know that the landscapes were exposed from sediments, from cores. But also, in trawling up these bones, we can use the species to tell us about the date ranges. And that points to, you know, these being terrestrial at points well over half a million years ago. Stone tools are a bit trickier. They tend to be brought up through aggregate extraction rather than seeing them prolifically through trawling, probably because they step through the gaps. So we have a few areas where we've actually been able to investigate these stone tools,

which tell us more specifically through typologies and dating of sediments about the time periods and areas that those are coming from as well. Thank you. Carl Cottrell, the highest part of this landmass is what we now know as Dogger Bank. What's that made of? Dogger Bank, it was first noted in a geological paper in 1874 by a gentleman called Thomas belt as a great dump of moraine rubbish, which basically means that it's the activity of ice streams and glaciers and ice sheets from the last ice age. And as they move across a landscape, predominantly coming from the north, but also from Britain and Irish ice sheet as well,

they scour up sediments, sand, gravels and also bits of rock from everything that they move over, they grind over it and sort of pulverise the underlying landscape. And it's, travels with them. It can travel on top of the ice. It can travel inside the ice. It can also travel underneath the ice. And when the ice starts to come to its end point and sort of reach its terminus and go into a retreat phase, all of this gets dumped out and left on the landscape as just layers of this glacial till is what we often call it. And this can happen over a number of times. So over the last ice age, the ice front came forward and moved back and forward and move back and fluctuated across the landscape.

And every time it moved forward, it would bulldoze all of this moraine rubbish that had been laid down beforehand and forming this big bank into a series of what we call thrust moraines. So we have this doggar bank, which is almost like a sort of a cap, a canopy over. Underneath that is the lost world of lakes, valleys, hills. Yes. So it would have been quite a formidable landscape that would have been left at the end. of the last ice age. Some of these moraine systems are 50 to 60 metres high. They're 10 to 20 kilometres in width and they run for about 60 kilometres. So I work based in Edinburgh. One of these

systems could easily have run all the way across Edinburgh, have been the size of the city. And so you're looking at a landscape that would have changed quite dramatically over the last ice age for people to migrate into with these great hills and these big valleys and channel systems running through it. And over time as the seas came up and as the seas finally flooded this area you've now got these marine sands that blanket this landscape

and bury it. So it's like a hidden glimpse that we're starting to get a handle on now. But are we saying about this dog-o-land that at certain stage, the East Coast, we're sticking to this area, I know it goes all over the place and as Vince pointed out at the beginning

the East Coast was joined to what we now call Europe and you just, what, it wasn't a bridge, it was a continuation. That's what we believe, based on the, we look at something called bithymetry. So we look at the contours of the land and we strip off the younger landscapes and look at what was lying beneath. And then as Vince mentioned, if you take the sea level drop and you lure it by 120 metres, you can start to see what would have been exposed land and there was this connection. So in that case, let's call it the UK, whatever, we'll take it.

Was an archipelago or not an island? Yes. Well, it would have been part of the landmass. It would have been part of mainland Europe. So there would be trekking backwards and forwards to find the most habitable places. They could well have done, yes. And at the height of the ice age, you could also have walked from Edinburgh to Oslo across the ice. Okay, Vince, can we now get down to more particulars about this landscape under this doggabank,

under this great sand heaps and so on? and it sounds almost a fantastical world because you can still find what do you tell us what you can find? Well, the most interesting thing about this is an archaeologist. We rely on the kindness of strangers to get our information.

We've been told already by Rachel that much of the actual cultural material we get from trawling. It's been chance finds. However, vast amounts of other activities being carried out in the North Sea. Oil and gas exploration,

aggregate extraction, most of our aggregates will come from the sea. More recently, wind farms, some of the largest wind farms in the world are now out in the sea and on the doggar bank itself. And all of these activities have given us information. Archaeologists could never

have afforded to look at this area to any extent. However, particularly... So what is the... information that's important to you? For me personally, the most important information has been the release of the huge seismic data sets that were

collected for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea. These were collected at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars and they stretch over tens of thousands of square kilometres within the North Sea. And they allow us, just like

radar on land, to look at essentially three-dimensional maps of the area under the sea. We've been able to take this data and strip it off and we've been able to identify rivers running across the sea. Thousands of kilometres of streams and rivers, dozens of lakes in the centre of the North Sea is the outer silver pit, a great big deep, marine deep, which would have been a lake. for most of this time, a very important feature, of course,

a water feature of that sort, and of course hills, valleys, we've been able to reconstruct currently over more than 43,000 square kilometres, which is about the area of the Netherlands. Essentially,

the basis of a prehistoric landscape. Now, up until... What is you used prehistoric? In what way? What distinguishes a prehistoric landscape? Well, in technical terms, a prehistoric landscape is that which is before history. However, in this case, it is very, very different.

And it is worth noticing, noting this about it. These landscapes are associated with the Mizlithic. They are about 9,500 to about 4,000 BC, right? Now, during that period, the whole of the land, the world changed. The shape of the world changed. By the beginning of the period, it was not a land we recognised. As the waters rose, not only did that happen, temperatures rose. So we moved from a period of tundra, glacial conditions,

right through to the mixed deciduous forests that we know today. and also during that period we run the it's a period of hunter-gatherers at the beginning the longest and most successful economic period in human history but at the end farming is being introduced in this area

it's very very different and this is a part that we know nothing about it's a big hole in the poolment of the archaeology of Europe which we do not know about and we need to But when you tick off the changes that happened in those 5,000 years, they're enormous. A landmaster size of India disappeared and so on. Certainly in Southeast Asia, that certainly happened in the area of the Sunder Straits.

And they're all associated with important events. In Northwest Europe, of course, we're looking at the colonisation. It's not a discovery. It's a rediscovery of this land. There were people out there and getting to, and we have essentially, constructed an archaeology of northwest Europe by conveniently forgetting or ignoring what was in the middle of it, which might have been the most productive during this period. Rachel, part of your research is you dive into these places. Very murky usually, actually, very murky, usually, actually.

Well, okay, so I have to admit, I have had the visibility so bad that you can't see your hand in front of your face, but at the moment I'm working up at Haysborough, the very early site dates to about 800,900,000 years. So what do you find there? Well, there, we can find more because the visibility is lovely. So we have quite a lot of, we can see quite far. We're looking for the extensions of these very early sites that have been found on the coast underwater. So Clement Reed actually mentioned he was looking in this area,

and he mentioned himself the fact that things were getting washed up on beaches. And we've been working with a lot of that material recently, so stone tools as well as animal remains. I'm trying to locate some of these sites. So the animals, things like rhinoceroses, hippos as well, some giant deer species, different species of mammoth, of elephant, that will change depending on whether it's a warmer period or a cooler period. So in the warmer periods, you might have straight-tussed elephants,

whereas in the cooler periods, well, I mean, there's quite a lot of overlap, really, at those stages. But lots of animals that you wouldn't recognize today. So it's incredible to work with them, as well as carnivore species too. have things like hyenas as well. And we see obviously human exploitation of these. So underwater, we're using the finds of these on the beaches and understanding of the sediment transport to try to pinpoint areas of seabed

where we think we might be able to find these deposits. Last year was the first time we had a good amount of time to do this. So we got two weeks to go diving, which is fantastic. And we did start to find exposures of these really early deposits that link to these archaeological sites. so some of them are incredibly organic rich. The entire kind of suite of deposits tells us tons of information about the environments at the time. So we've been able to survey and sample and hopefully go back soon

and continue searching for the archaeology within those deposits. So gradually I'm up. Carol Cottrell, what sort of map is now emerging? Vince has talked about his research, we've heard Rachel, her research. What's now emerging? Because it seems as if it's a fast move forward in the last. few years from people like your three selves? It is an incredible leap forward.

Certainly the data that we have been working on on Dogger Bank, if you overlay the wind farm area, I'm looking predominantly at wind farm data. If you overlay that on, its sort of southwestern most tip would be around the Solent in Hampshire, and its north-eastern most tip would stretch up

to the Norfolk coast. And you can get the whole of the M-25 and London inside this area. So it's a massive area. and I'm using the seismic that Vince mentioned, so using sound to image beneath the seabed and see certain horizons. So how do you do that? So we use a sound source that is towed from a vessel,

and then we have a series of microphones or hydrophones that are streamed behind the vessel. And where you get a change in the density of the sediment, so for example moving from a sand into a clay, your sound will reflect off it. It's a bit like echo sound. So what does that give you? So that gives us a map of what we call horizons.

So we know that there is a change there for some reason. It could be a change in the type of sediment. It could be a change in how dense the sediments are. So if ice is sat on something and compressed it versus if ice hasn't been there, we'll get a reflection. But you start to build up these maps of these buried landscapes. And we also go out and we take core material. So I have 96 effective needles, I guess, in this big area and this big landscape.

But it gives me actual material. to look from and work from. So we found evidence of peats there. We found evidence of swamp plants and ferns and bog plants. We found evidence of birch trees. We found pollens that are representative of forests. And they all sit at certain levels within our core. And you can start to piece together how the actual environment changed and how the landscape changed. And from that, people like Vince and Rachel can then put on the story of where people might have moved to, how they migrated. At its best, can you give the list of some idea of what the environment was like over a few thousand years, between 9,000, 5,000?

It's a big ask, but can you have a go? I can have a go. So, again, as Vince mentioned, we would have started off with tundra. So we're looking at something like Siberia, as you see it today, the northern Siberian. So there would have been an area that would have frozen in winter. There would have been quite harsh winters. You would have had permafrost, potentially down tens of metres. you wouldn't have been able to dig into the ground

with snow cover and ice and strong winds coming down from the north. But in summer you would get thawing and so in any sort of valleys you might have had temporary lakes forming, nice quiet areas. And then the ice move further away, the global temperature starts to warm up

and you start to get tree species coming in and you start to get swamp plants coming in and the sort of first greenery coming back into the landscape as it sort of wakes up from this freezer environment. And so that moves on then and you start to get rivers and channels being cut through the landscape as all the melt water from these melting glaciers starts coming down through this system.

So you would have got braided channels and river systems coming with plants and animals starting to flourish along those. So to plants, the animals and then the humans? I'm going to look to the other experts in the river. That is what we are surmising. Yes, I mean that would make sense from a climate point of view. but you then go into an environment where you've got rapidly changing shorelines. So you're moving from something that was part of a big landmass

to something that is becoming increasingly isolated. But you would get beaches and lagoons and gravel beaches, sand beaches, the kind of lagoons that we see today along our current coastline forming until finally the island is completely submerged and it becomes a marine environment. Thank you very much. You flinch when I ask you about you. do you flinchments? Absolutely.

This must be one of the few archaeological areas of interest where you're essentially defined by what you don't know. The problem Rachel said at the edges we can see some things. But in the centre of the

Dogger Land, we have no evidence or until recently we have had no evidence. What's the recent evidence then? The most recent evidence was several flints which came from from prospecting, looking for actual stratigraphy which might contain cultural evidence. But up till now, you cannot work in the North Sea in a normal way. Most of our ideas about these areas have come from the sides.

Settlements like Boudner Cliff on the south of Britain, which is a Britain's only real submerged mislythic settlement. But that's 6,000 BC. we're talking for 3,000 years earlier. We do have exceptional sites. Star Car and Yorkshire is one of them, which is significant because even at about 8,500 BC, very early in the Mesolithic,

it has a house, the earliest of houses, but we have to extrapolate this into the area of the North Sea. Carl, you want to come in? Well, I was just going to back vince up on how difficult this is with a lot of the core material that we've obtained. You can use different forms of dating to find out how old something is.

But when you impose that onto the picture of ice moving material backwards and forwards and rucking it up and messing it up, and you then think about the impact of the sea coming up and eroding things away, we might be able to get dates for certain plant species that we found, but we don't know whether they're in situ.

So are they in the place where they were initially laid down? So is that a true date for that? depth. So a lot of this is trying to get lots of puzzle pieces and put them together with your sort of best expert guest work, I guess. But pursuing the human, Rachel Biner,

humans there are the Stone Age, men and women and so on, how far do you get with your diving discoveries and the tools that you're on earth, I suppose you're saying, well actually so, I sit the opposite end to Vince. So where Vince is working

in the Mesolithic, that most recent period of exposure. I'm working at just under a million years or so. So somewhere around 800,900,000 years are the deposits that I'm looking for. And at this point, the landscapes, again, were exposed. So you could have walked from Britain over to the coast of Holland. So it's kind of demonstrating the fact that while we talk about these landscapes, generally speaking in a more recent way, recent to us, I suppose recent to geologists, within the past 20,000 years, you know, they have been there repeatedly over the past million years.

And so the occupation that we see in Britain would have been associated with these landscapes, almost the entire time we had people here, we had these landscapes forming. Burns. It's important that we realise that these dramatic changes aren't just over the longer term. Even in the period that we're talking about in the Mizzletic

from about 9.5 to about 5,000 BC, these events, not linear. The inundation starts very, very rapidly after the glacial period. It's probably up to 12, 14 millimeters a year at that point, which is extremely rapid and it decreases in the Mesolithic period. But it's not linear. There are things which happen. There are cooled snap. Glaciers move forward. Things become cooled quite dramatically in some cases. The Mesolithic itself, the Holocene starts after a very cold period. In about 8.2 kille years,

there's an event 6,200 BCs. Yes, 6,200 BC, 8,200 years ago. Out up in the Americas, the Laurentide Ice Sheet started to collapse. Lake Agassiz and other lakes flew into these mega ice lakes, flew into the North Sea. They caused a collapse in temperature at that point.

and a rapid rise and sea level, perhaps half a metre at 1.2 meters at this point. In how? In a very short amount of time. Years, years we're talking about. 10 years? Well, the actual 8.2 Kiliya goes over 60 years, but its actual event is longer than that. However, the point about this is there's major variation during these times. People are adapting to the move.

I don't believe they're moving off the area at this point in time, but these niches change. It's a very dynamic landscape. It's not linear. Carl, you want to come in? No, just again, supporting what Vince is saying from the data that we've got from Dogger Bank, there is something that forms that we call a ravinement surface.

So when your sea level starts coming back in and you have your wave base starting to erode away some material, you can sometimes get this very hardened, sort of cemented surface that forms, which is one of these surface. that provides a really nice, bright echo and return from our sound source when we put it in the water. And we've noticed that we've mapped at least six of these across the southern part of Dogger Bank. So that would suggest that the sea tried to rise or the sea level rose partially at least six times before falling back again, before coming back in again.

So backing up this theory that there were these rapid changes in climate before everything finally stabilized. I'm still in pursuit of Stone Age man bins. Can you help me? Have you any idea now with Rachel's discoveries and more that you're finding from the stuff that's coming up from the North Sea drilling, the wind farm and all the rest of it? Any idea when, in what numbers? Well, it is genuinely very difficult to say that exactly. But we're talking about thousands of people. This must have been one of the densest settled areas.

And the problem about... Why must it have been? Simply because of the resource-richness of the coastlines in particular. When we see coasts, and remember, we don't see stuff because the coasts are underwater. When we do see coasts, generally, for instance, Goldcliff in the 7th Estuary, 6,000 years ago, you see the footprints of people every year. Families, children, grandparents, probably all running across the following deer prints. these areas are extremely important.

They may also hold types of cultures we can't see on land because they were specific to the North Sea and there is some good evidence for that, particularly in relationship to the appearance of houses in Britain. Rachel, you want to come in? Yeah, I wanted to say this is something that's really interesting for us, as Paleolithic archaeologists, said people that work further back in time

because you do see this in the Mesolithic and it's probably the first time, and correct me if I'm wrong, that we think really there's probably continuous occupation of Britain. So when we look further back when we have these landscapes, we don't think we have continuous population.

We think the population sizes were quite small. So the archaeological visibility is very difficult. Furthermore, the further back we go, the deposits we're dealing with are more and more fragmented, so it becomes incredibly challenging. But this idea that these coastal landscapes could have been really highly productive and very attractive to these people is something that archaeologists that work in the paleothic are often asking themselves.

So one of the key things I suppose is that we're looking for in these submerged landscapes and which we kind of have the edges off at Haysborough is that occupation of those coastal landscapes so that we can start talking about whether this was something that was true throughout the history of just our species or if it went before that, if this was about our ancestors as well, if there's something to do with the productivity of these environments that makes them attractive for occupation throughout the entire period of occupation, really. You're suggesting a difference there, from anything we know about now.

Can you give us a clue to the difference? Well, there are hints. There are, for instance, at a period from about 8,500 to 7,500, We find houses in the mezzly. What sort of houses? Quite significant. The best known perhaps is the house at Hawick, which is on the coast of Nathamund.

Coincidentally, at the point where the land rises north and sinks to the south, it's a point of stability, where a large, probably turf-coloured house built, constructed over a pit, lasted for several hundred years. So that meant generations of people lived in this. Now, houses are interesting, because they're not just places to live. They're statements about where you live as well.

And there seems to be a period when they start to appear at around, I'll say, post-8,500 BC. Now, some people have suggested that this may even be the result of people coming off the North Sea plain onto the land. there's also at about 8,400, a change in technology as well at that point. What's that? There's a move from so-called broad blade to narrow blade to stone tools.

Microlythes are the key tool of the mesolithic, these small flints which may be used as composite tools set into wood, either as things like arrows, but also scrapers, perhaps for grating, creating vegetable stuff up and that never forget how productive these areas are at times but there is at least another point

we should be considering that what we may be seeing is the settlement pattern of the North Sea this highly productive area where you may see semi-sedentary occupation because the idea that the past is short, brutish and nasty

and you've got people wondering around sometimes for no apparent reason as far as you can see but is almost certainly not the case some of these areas may be productive enough that people are able to stay for lengthy periods of time social events occur

and for instance housing may be a reflection of social but you give it a tremendous distinction you say this may have been one of the most productive economic areas in northwest Europe

I think there's very little doubt about that, but the problem is how do you get the evidence? Now we are doing, in my own, in my own research, we're doing something slightly different. It's very difficult

to find things in a systematic manner. If you drop a core in a four inch core into the middle of the North Sea, finding something is difficult. What we're doing is dropping cores down river valleys because essentially you go back in time as you go down the river valleys.

So you can start to recreate the landscape more productively then. What you then do, once you've got both the topography, once you've got the vegetation, you can then look at places where they are likely to be both productive and settlement may occur. And actually, that's why, in the first two weeks of actually prospecting for tools

on the basis of what we knew, evidence of human activity, we found lithics within the North Sea. Nobody has ever done that before. Everything else is a chance find. That is true. Yeah, we'll very rely on chance. Carl, do we have any evidence

but what happened when the land was submerged? Was submerged? Did the people, over a period of time, did they gradually walk away and go to come here or there or somewhere else? We don't have, well, I guess my short answer would be no. not really.

Certainly most of my work is concentrated actually on Dogger Bank on this high. And unfortunately, there's very little surface sediments that could have retained any evidence of what happened to people as the level rose. And so what we're finding are just very thin veneers of sand there with no artefacts remaining at all. So from the research that I'm doing, we see their landscape where possibly people thrive,

certainly there was the vegetation there, the streams, the channels, but we don't see anything after the landscape flooded. It's also, I think, quite interesting when you think about these questions, in terms of how people would have responded to this. So, again, sometimes with archaeology, particularly the further back we go, it's hard to think about the social nature of people. But one of the interesting things about the sea level rise, and again, the further back you go, the harder it gets to talk,

about, but we can use these earlier, these young, these more recent periods rather, as a kind of proxy to think about this. And what I love is that when you look at these reconstructions of the changes to the landscapes in the Southern North Sea from about 12,000 years onwards, in quite high resolution, so in, you know, in 500 year kind of time intervals, you don't just see the sea rapidly moving in towards. the land. It's been, it's been referred to earlier, I think, that you, you know, this changes. It's incredibly dynamic. So you may get the sea moving in in one place, but you get another area forming islands. The waterways would have changed. The productivity of these environments

would have changed. You could get wetlands forming. And all of this kind of changes the way that people would have seen these landscapes. So where we see sea level rise is something that's very negative and terrifying because we're very sedentary and we have really high population densities. In the past, where those two things weren't quite so strong, perhaps, this potentially would have, I mean, it would have had, it could have been catastrophic at points, perhaps, but generally speaking, this would have been a slow process that would have just changed the affordances of these areas. So it's not necessarily something to be seen in a negative life. What have you found that you most want to follow up, Vince? Well, personally, after the past

over the past 50 or 60 years, people have been trolling up artefacts around a place called the Brown Bank, which is about 40 kilometres from the Dutch, within the Dutch sector of the North Sea. This is remarkable because it is clear that there is a settlement out there. And not only that,

you've got both material, which is clearly of mesolithic date, but also neolithic material. There's a type of axe called a Mickle, Berger Axe, 4,200, 3 and a half, I think, which several of which come from this area. Now, one, if we're going to find a settlement in the North Sea, our best bet, in the heart of the North Sea, our best bet is probably there.

But it's interesting because this area probably retained some sort of significance during the Neolithic period as well. So, you know, the aware of it, of the loss of land and potentially areas of settlement may still occur in these areas. Carl, how did the disappearance of Doggerland affect the European Peninsula of Britain? Oh, that's quite a tough one. I don't, from my view working as a geologist, what it has done is it has preserved a landscape for us to go back and investigate. It's a time capsule. It's a landscape that hasn't been modified by man. It hasn't

had infrastructure built on it. It hasn't had its history destroyed. So it's actually preserved this unique history for us to be able to go back and investigate. And I think that's the importance. Well, thank you very much, Carl Cotrell, Rachel Baino and Vince Gaffney. Next week, it's the Spanish poet and playwright Loka, author of Blood Wedding, Yama, and the House of Bernardo Alba, murdered by nationalists at the start of the Spanish Civil War. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

What did we miss out? Any big things we missed out? Well, probably a lot. Well, let's start with you, Rachel. What did we miss out? Well, I come from the Paleolithic perspective. So from my perspective, the importance of these earlier landscapes

and our understanding of human evolution in these really quite harsh, than latitudes, but also, I suppose, the importance of the way we do that. And the work that Vince does and the work that Carol does basically is kind of underpins everything, right? These big picture and the seismics and the geophysics is something that we all use when we work in these areas. But I think that the search for archaeology, the small scale, the diving aspect of things,

I find really important. And I know that's something that you are looking at with these areas offshore, possibly if the conditions allow. When we get the right site. Exactly. I know. Yeah, exactly. To say, but yeah, the ability to go down there to ground truth,

to really see the deposits, to feel the deposit. To be able to think, I wonder how this relates to this. To understand the site itself, I think, is one of the kind of really important ways that we need to also work with this archaeology, because we would never consider doing a terrestrial excavation without having people investigating it if it was possible. So I think the same, if we can, goes for working offshore, being able to have a broader understanding of the sites, the

landscapes, rather than just a keyhole approach, I suppose, which we are often, it's often all we have to do, really, all we can do. I think for me it's the, it's fascinating. This is a big geological jigsaw puzzle that no one really knew was there until we started getting this data from, from the wind farms that are looking at developing the area, and they were kind enough to share their data with us. And so what we're seeing is a landscape that evolved because of ice that had an impact on humans that then became marine. Now is this perfect archive for us, but even now is having an impact on society and on people nowadays

because we're trying to build renewable energy and wind turbines off there. And what we're finding is that the processes that happened have affected the sediments and the strength of them. And so how we build on it, how we construct on it. but also we're finding sites that we need to preserve for sort of, you know, archaeologists and for historical use. So we're working very closely with archaeologists in preserving these sites. So preserving the past so that we can understand it. But that past is also having an impact on the future as well.

So it's a very interesting juxtaposition of how the landscape works with people. Yeah, I think there is a long historical point here. The first one is what we knew and when we knew it. Actually, even though we often think Clement Reed is the start of this, it's not true. He was summarising evidence from at least 50 or 60 years beforehand. The fact that H.G. Wells in the late 90s wrote a short story of the Stone Age, which was based out and recognised the lands that were underneath the North Sea is something. The other point, which goes on from the last comment,

is about what it is and what it all means for us. The first thing is, we are looking at totally unexplored countries. Where else could you... I mean where else in the world? No, where else in the world could you... Could you find complete rivers, lakes, hills and valleys that have never been mapped before? That had human occupation in. And what does it mean for us at the moment?

Well, it clearly means something. There has been quite a lot of interest in the area of dog land in literary terms recently. And of course, it's the last time that modern man, experienced climate change to the extent that we are likely to experience in the future. It was not anthropogenic, that's certain. But nonetheless, when the Great Plains were inundated, people moved out. They had probably places to move. There was probably suffering, I feel, even though much of the time it may not have been realized,

there was suffering. And, you know, we don't have those planes anymore, and all our populations are on the coastlines, just like they were in the Mesolithic, I would suggest. And there is something for at least for us all to ponder upon. Getting an idea of it at the time. Could we say that Thames was a tributary of the Rhine and things like that?

Was that that joined up landscape? Well, some of this is a deep, deep, deep history. You're being pointed out, but. I am being pointed out, yes. I'm digging back into my geological knowledge here. But we know that the rivers, the old river systems were flowing northwards at the time. They were building this big delta out towards the northeast that had a very gentle dip. It would have been a very big, broad coastline, very sandy.

And we know that that was being built out before the last ice age came back in. And rivers were flowing north. So it's actually that the last ice age impacted not only the landscape in, by forming these big hill features and some of these big pits and scouring things out. But that's also when a lot of the river systems started changing their course because of the influence of the ice and the loading

and where the sea was and where the sea wasn't at the time. The idea of the doggarbank area and the doggarland being a land bridge persisted for some time. When did that get blown away? That's definitely a bug bear of mine. I think the term land bridge is really... I mean, it's used quite a lot often to describe submerged landscapes, particularly when they're joining two landmassives.

But it's quite unhelpful, I think. Brian E. Coles has brought this up in her 90s paper, you know, and it's this idea that people were maybe standing in northern France and they wanted to go to Britain, and they crossed this bridge that was the southern North Sea. It's this crazy idea to think that people at the time would have viewed these landscapes as anything other than the landscape that they lived within. So it's quite a reductive term, I think.

and it's been problematic. I remember being asked, when did the land bridge break just after I left university 100 or years ago. It is deflected our attention. The fact that it was so difficult to work in these areas, with a few notable exceptions,

Roger Jacoby, the great Mesolithic archaeologist was one of those. But it allowed archaeologists around Europe to complacently forget about what was underneath the North Sea. They got on with the easy bits on land and they constructed

a history which was only partial and the damage I suspected has done for a period which is clearly so critical in the formation of the modern world is significant and we continue to live with it. I've slightly lost there.

They did damage to our understanding. Yes because if you only looked at the hinterlands how could you understand the entirety of the history of North West Europe? Because our language is really important. So if you talk about something like it's just a land bridge, it's just a root weight where people moved through to go from one landscape to the other, then you stop yourself properly thinking and discussing these things.

These points are just brushed aside. They don't become part of our academic discourse. We don't push them any further because it's just a land bridge. So in that way, I think, you mean it's been destructive to the discipline. and we're only now beginning to recover from that in some sense. Now technology has helped us. The accessibility of vast seismic data sets has been a complete game changer. But that's only been really for archaeologists in the last decade that we've been able to do it.

But we've got these massive areas. And do remember, the archaeology of the Mesolithic archaeology of Europe and Britain is different. there are significant differences between these areas. There's a gradient, a cultural gradient, and we've missed this big chunk in the middle to explain what is going on around the edges. Those big questions about it. For the Mesolithic, it's about what is missing in these areas.

And for the earlier periods, it's about where are these people coming from? They're moving from Europe. Do we see different types of technologies coming from different parts of Europe? And so being able to engage with sites that are in this big area, big piece of the jigsaw that we're missing, would really be very helpful to answering those questions.

So it's just our entire record is truncated. So everything we're talking about really is kind of biased. But Vinch, do you expect quite soon to bulk out your theories with more facts and discoveries? Yes, I think we really are at a cusp. We've got to the point that we can map these areas. we have a moderate idea of the chronology, much still needs to be done. We have a problem in understanding the significance of some changes,

but nonetheless we're at the point that we will be able to identify areas of cultural interest and we will be able to recover data. It is coming. I think we're moving into a time period now where every, is very much working in a much more cross-disciplinary manner. So when we're starting to look at constructing, say, an offshore wind farm, we have to work with archaeologists, we have to work with biologists. We look at the environments past and present to see what's being affected.

So we're finding these sites because these sites are actively being looked for now rather than just companies coming in and putting a development in place because it happens to be handy. We're looking to actively preserve these sites and work out our history. I think that's right. You can go back to Clement Reed here because back in, when he wrote his book Submerged Forest in 1913,

he did actually say there is a tendency to put science into little boxes and there are areas which cross over, these debatable areas which tend to be ignored. You know, in this area, within the submerged forests

and the landscapes there. He did actually point out, he said, you know, are geologists say they're too recent to be of interest, and archaeologists say they're too geological to be interest. And he said both will pass on, and they did for the best part of 60 or 70 years. And it's the large interdisciplinary teams which are now making a difference. I think our producer is pawing at the ground to come in. Sorry. Do you want to your coffee? A coffee case. Tea. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.

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