Mapping Doggerland: The Mesolithic Landscapes of the Southern North Sea

by Kenneth Thomson, Simon Fitch, Vincent Gaffney (Editor)

12,000 years ago the area that now forms the southern North Sea was dry a vast plain populated by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. By 5,500 BC the entire area had disappeared beneath the sea as a consequence of rising sea levels. Until now, this unique landscape remained hidden from view and almost entirely unknown. The North Sea Palaeolandscape Project, funded by the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund, have mapped 23,000 km2 of this “lost world” using seismic data collected for mineral exploration. "Mapping Doggerland" demonstrates that the North Sea covers one of the largest and best preserved prehistoric landscapes in Europe. In mapping this exceptional landscape the project has begun to provide an insight into the historic impact of the last great phase of global warming experienced by modern man and to assess the significance of the massive loss of European land that occurred as a consequence of climate change. 1) Mapping Doggerland Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson; 2) Coordinating Marine Survey Data Sources (Mark Bunch, Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson); 3) 3D Seismic Reflection Data, Associated Technologies and the Development of the Project Methodology (Kenneth Thomson and Vincent Gaffney); 4. Merging The integration and visualisation of spatial data sets used in the project (Simon Fitch, Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson); 5) A Geomorphological Investigation of Submerged Depositional Features within the Outer Silver Pit, Southern North Sea (Simon Fitch, Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson; 6) Salt Tectonics in the Southern North Controls on Late Pleistocene-Holocene Geomorphology (Simon Holford, Kenneth Thomson and Vincent Gaffney); 7) An Atlas of the Palaeolandscapes of the Southern North Sea (Simon Fitch, Vincent Gaffney, Kenneth Thomson with Kate Briggs, Mark Bunch and Simon Holford); 8) The Potential of the Organic Archive for Environmental An Assessment of Selected Borehole Sediments from the Southern North Sea (David Smith, Simon Fitch, Ben Gearey, Tom Hill, Simon Holford, Andy Howard and Christina Jolliffe); 9) Heritage Management and the North Sea Palaeolandscapes Project (Simon Fitch, Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson). See further information at Mapping Doggerland

Table of Contents

1) Mapping Doggerland Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson

2) Coordinating Marine Survey Data Sources (Mark Bunch, Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson)

3) 3D Seismic Reflection Data, Associated Technologies and the Development of the Project Methodology (Kenneth Thomson and Vincent Gaffney)

4. Merging The integration and visualisation of spatial data sets used in the project (Simon Fitch, Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson)

5) A Geomorphological Investigation of Submerged Depositional Features within the Outer Silver Pit, Southern North Sea (Simon Fitch, Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson

6) Salt Tectonics in the Southern North Controls on Late Pleistocene-Holocene Geomorphology (Simon Holford, Kenneth Thomson and Vincent Gaffney)

7) An Atlas of the Palaeolandscapes of the Southern North Sea (Simon Fitch, Vincent Gaffney, Kenneth Thomson with Kate Briggs, Mark Bunch and Simon Holford)

8) The Potential of the Organic Archive for Environmental An Assessment of Selected Borehole Sediments from the Southern North Sea (David Smith, Simon Fitch, Ben Gearey, Tom Hill, Simon Holford, Andy Howard and Christina Jolliffe)

9) Heritage Management and the North Sea Palaeolandscapes Project (Simon Fitch, Vincent Gaffney and Kenneth Thomson).

Genres: Nonfiction

143 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2007

Reviews

[Roy Lotz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book years ago for my final project in an upper-level archaeology course. Our job was to create an elaborate proposal for an archaeology expedition, with a potentially infinite budget. I chose to investigate Doggerland.

Doggerland is the nickname for the former area of land, now taken up (quite inconveniently) by the English Channel and the North Sea. European hunter-gatherers lived in the area for a long time, until they were gradually pushed out by the rising sea levels, about 8,500 years ago. As a result, there is a potentially huge number of artifacts sitting on the sea floor, with good preservation conditions.

This book is a collection of articles about a project to map the area. The researchers used undersea maps made available by oil companies. The articles themselves are rather dense and technical; many are not about geology or archaeology at all, but rather about processing data. The book is certainly not for casual reading. Still, it served its purpose well, and provided me with ample inspiration for my own fantasy project.

Here was my proposal. First I would send dozens of underwater robots to scour the seafloor, methodically taking high-resolution photographs of every square inch of the area. This would give me a huge amount of raw data. To shift through it, I would crowdsource by creating an iPhone game, wherein players accumulate points for going through the images and marking the ones that look potentially interesting; they could later convert these points into cash, and the player with the most points would be acknowledged in the publication. The locations of the images selected by the gamers would then be plotted on a map, where hopefully we would see trends and concentrations. After archaeologists selected the areas with the best potential, diving and submarine teams would be sent in, and the results would be analyzed on floating research labs.

It's a pity there isn't an infinite amount of money for stuff like this.