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DOGGERLAND
Doggerland refers to a vast area between present-day England and the Netherlands that was exposed when the ice sheets covering the land there melted around 18,000 years ago and was submerged by the sea about 12,000 years ago, when the level of the North Sea rose as more Ice Are glaciers melted. Archaeologists have found human remains and artifacts have been dredged up or pulled up by fishermen. [Source: Tom Metcalfe, Live Science, June 24, 2019]
Fisherman working in North Sea primarily off the Dutch coast were the first to notice signs of Doggerland. They occasionally dragged up bones and artifacts that appeared to have been connected to people that lived during the last Ice Age when sea levels were lower and migrated to higher ground when sea levels rose.
Laura Spinney wrote in National Geographic: “When signs of a lost world at the bottom of the North Sea first began to appear, no one wanted to believe them. The evidence started to surface a century and a half ago, when fishermen along the Dutch coast widely adopted a technique called beam trawling. They dragged weighted nets across the seafloor and hoisted them up full of sole, plaice, and other bottom fish. But sometimes an enormous tusk would spill out and clatter onto the deck, or the remains of an aurochs, woolly rhino, or other extinct beast. The fishermen were disturbed by these hints that things were not always as they are. What they could not explain, they threw back into the sea. [Source: Laura Spinney, National Geographic, December 2012]
“The story of that vanished land begins with the waning of the ice. Eighteen thousand years ago, the seas around northern Europe were some 400 feet lower than today. Britain was not an island but the uninhabited northwest corner of Europe, and between it and the rest of the continent stretched frozen tundra. As the world warmed and the ice receded, deer, aurochs, and wild boar headed northward and westward. The hunters followed. Coming off the uplands of what is now continental Europe, they found themselves in a vast, low-lying plain.
The term Doggerland was coined in the late 1990s by University of Exeter archaeologist Bryony Coles, who named it after Dogger Bank, a submerged sandbank and occasional shipping hazard 100 kilometers (60 miles) off the English coast frequented by Dutch fishing vessels known as doggers. Once thought of as a largely uninhabited land bridge between modern-day continental Europe and Britain—a place on the way to somewhere else—Doggerland is now believed to have been settled by Mesolithic people, probably in large numbers, until they were forced out of it thousands of years later by the relentlessly rising sea. A period of climatic and social upheaval ensued until, by the end of the Mesolithic, Europe had lost a substantial portion of its landmass and looked much as it does today.”
Mesolithic Period (Middle Stone Age)
Doggerland was inhabited by people during Mesolithic Period (Middle Stone Age), an archaeological period between the Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic primarily used to describe Europe and the Middle East. It refers to the final period of hunter-gatherer cultures before the arrival of agriculture in these regions between the end of the Last Glacial Maximum and the Neolithic Revolution. It extends roughly from 15,000 to 5,000 years ago in Europe; and from 20,000 to 10,000 years ago in the Middle East. But other dates are used. Some say the the Mesolithic period extends from 10,000 to 4000 B.C. in Europe. The term is less used of areas farther east, and not at all beyond Eurasia and North Africa. The term Epipaleolithic is often used synonymously, especially for outside northern Europe, and for the corresponding period in the Levant and Caucasus. The Mesolithic has different time spans in different parts of Eurasia. [Source: Wikipedia]
According to National Geographic and Live Science: Many have come to see Doggerland as the key to understanding the Mesolithic in northern Europe, and the Mesolithic, in turn, as a period that holds lessons for us—living as we are through another period of climate change. The Mesolithic period for humans was a time of severe climate change across the world. At this time, the ice sheets that covered much of northern Europe, Asia and North America began to melt away, creating new lands that became populated by animal herds and people. [Source: Tom Metcalfe, Live Science, June 24, 2019]
Andrew Curry wrote in National Geographic: “About 14,500 years ago, as Europe began to warm, humans followed the retreating glaciers north. In the ensuing millennia, they developed more sophisticated stone tools and settled in small villages.[Source: Andrew Curry, National Geographic, August 2019]
Discovery of Doggerland
Jason Urbanus wrote in Archaeology Magazine: On a September night in 1931, the British fishing vessel Colinda was sailing 25 miles off the Norfolk coast of England near the North Sea’s Leman and Ower Banks. Trawlers like Colinda operated by dragging nets across the sea floor, scooping up everything in their path — fish, shells, seaweed, or otherwise. As the crew hauled up their net from a depth of 120 feet, the boat’s skipper, Pilgrim Lockwood, noticed a large block of peat among the catch. As he smacked it with his shovel to break it up and toss it overboard, he hit something hard, which he later recalled sounded like striking metal. Upon examination, Lockwood noticed an unusual object embedded in the clump. It was 8.5 inches long, with a barbed edge, and appeared to resemble some sort of prehistoric harpoon carved from bone or antler.[Source: Jason Urbanus, Archaeology Magazine, March/April 2022]
Experts from the British Museum who examined the Colinda harpoon, as it came to be called, determined that it likely dated to the Mesolithic period (10,000–4000 B.C.). Archaeologists wrestled with the question of how such an object had ended up more than 20 miles offshore at the bottom of the North Sea. It seemed unlikely that prehistoric mariners could have dropped it during a fishing expedition, given the limited long-distance seafaring capabilities they possessed at the time.
The scientific world was shocked the year following the artifact’s discovery when pollen analysis carried out on peat extracted from the Leman and Ower Banks indicated that, although it lay 120 feet below the sea, the deposit had formed in a freshwater environment, not a marine one. Whoever had lost the harpoon had done so while walking across land. This revelation was groundbreaking. Although some scholars had theorized that the North Sea was once much lower, as evidenced by the remnants of ancient forests that occasionally protrude out of tidal flats at places such as Pett Level in Sussex, England, the Colinda harpoon was the first tangible piece of evidence suggesting that an extensive landmass had once connected Great Britain to the continent. “It’s an important object because the idea became clear that not only was this a landscape that was not always sea,” says Luc Amkreutz, curator of prehistoric collections at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, “but that it must have been one inhabited by humans.”
Throughout the later twentieth century, further evidence of this drowned world continued to be dredged up by fishing nets, as trawlers raised bone, antler, and stone artifacts that had lain along the seafloor for thousands of years. Laura Spinney wrote in National Geographic: “A resourceful amateur paleontologist named Dick Mol persuaded the fishermen to bring him the bones and note the coordinates of where they had found them. In 1985 one captain brought Mol a beautifully preserved human jawbone, complete with worn molars. With his friend, fellow amateur Jan Glimmerveen, Mol had the bone radiocarbon-dated. It turned out to be 9,500 years old, meaning the individual lived during the Mesolithic period, which in northern Europe began at the end of the last ice age some 12,000 years ago and lasted until the advent of farming 6,000 years later. “We think it comes from a burial,” says Glimmerveen. “One that has lain undisturbed since that world vanished beneath the waves, about 8,000 years ago.” [Source: Laura Spinney, National Geographic, December 2012]
Doggerland Inhabitants
Finds in Dutch waters of the North Sea include a 13,000-year-old skull fragment of what's known as the world's "oldest Dutchwoman," who was one of the hunter-gatherer people of Doggerland. Dredged up by a Dutch fishing boat trawling in the North Sea in 2013, the bone fragment is from the left side the skull of an adult aged between 22 and 45 years. The shape of the skull suggests it probably came from a woman, and chemical analysis indicates she was part of a hunter-gatherer community that often ate meat from hunted animals. [Source: Tom Metcalfe, Live Science, February 28, 2018]
The Doggerland Jawbone refers to jawbone and teeth of a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer that lived in Doggerland around 8,300 years ago and was extremely well preserved by the oxygen-free environment under the North Sea. Some evidence, such as strange postmortem cut marks on human bone fragments, suggests that Doggerland’s Mesolithic people may have even performed rituals on their dead. “We are going to try and squeeze out every bit of information we can from these displaced finds,” Amkreutz says. [Sources: Jason Urbanus, Archaeology Magazine, March/April 2022; Tom Metcalfe, Live Science, June 24, 2019]
Jason Urbanus wrote in Archaeology Magazine: The remains of butchered bones suggest how animals were hunted and which species were consumed. Amkreutz and his colleagues are even starting to learn about the people themselves and their behavior. Because the oxygen-free conditions of the North Sea’s deposits preserve organic materials extremely well, they are able to extract DNA from human skeletal remains found on the seafloor. This is providing information about individuals’ sex, age, and physical characteristics, while isotope analysis is producing data about their diet and geographic origins. [Source: Jason Urbanus, Archaeology Magazine, March/April 2022]
Doggerland was, by any estimation, the most attractive landscape in northwestern Europe for Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and perhaps the continent’s most densely populated region at the time. Because of the seemingly inexhaustible resources present there, normally mobile Mesolithic societies may have been encouraged to create permanent or semipermanent settlements. By studying variations, or isotopes, of carbon and nitrogen in bones, scientists determined humans ate animals that lived on land and in freshwater.
Doggerland Artifacts
Artifacts recovered from Doggerland include an antler spearpoint known as the Colinda harpoon dredged up by a fishing trawler in 1931 near the Leman and Ower Banks of the North Sea; the Doggerland Aurochs Pick, a perforated pick made from the leg bone of an aurochs was dredged up from Brown Bank; Doggerland Barbed Spearpoints, large and small barbed spearpoints and arrowheads carved from bone and antler by Doggerland’s Mesolithic inhabitants.
The Doggerland Hammerstone is fragment of a hammerstone was discovered at the Southern River estuary site. The Doggerland Zigzag Bone is a 13,000-year-old aurochs or bison bone etched with a zigzag design was recovered near Brown Bank. It has been called the "oldest Dutch artwork." A tree stump from an ancient submerged forest that is at least 6,000 years old protrudes from a beach at low tide at Pett Level in Sussex, England.
Jason Urbanus wrote in Archaeology Magazine: Artifacts found by collectors include stone tools such as arrowheads, axes, hammers, and adzes, as well as almost 2,000 barbed points made from bone or antler. These beach finds, combined with those netted by fisherman, have created an astounding inventory of objects that were used by Doggerland’s inhabitants. [Source: Jason Urbanus, Archaeology Magazine, March/April 2022]
In the past these artifacts were commonly disregarded by archaeologists since they lacked context, but that has changed. “Until about 10 or 15 years ago, they were deemed rather worthless,” says Amkreutz. “But there are new techniques that are allowing us to get a lot of data out of these finds.” Researchers are now studying the stone, bone, and antler projectile points to learn which materials were preferred and where they were sourced. They are analyzing how these tools were made and hafted, and how they evolved and changed shape over time.
There are nearly 1,000 known bones weapons from Doggerland, named for the nearby Dogger Bank, a shallow area popular in the Middle Ages among Dutch fishing boats, called doggers. Some of these barbed points are small, about 2.5 inches (9 centimeters) long, but others are longer, the researchers said. The barbed points could have been thrown like javelins, launched like arrows from a bow, or thrust from spears, Dekker said. Whatever the method, impact scars and cracks on their tips show they had high-velocity impacts with targets, earlier research found.
These artifacts have washed ashore in the Netherlands for years, but the number of findings accelerated over the past few decades as the Dutch began dredging the seafloor to help fortify their coastlines, Dekker added. Radiocarbon dating revealed that these bone weapons dated to between 11,000 and 8,000 years ago, during the Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age, Dekker and his colleagues found. By analyzing unique collagen proteins in each bone, the team determined the species for each weapon. Finally, by studying variations, or isotopes, of carbon and nitrogen in each of the bones, the team learned that, unsurprisingly, the deer had an herbivorous diet.
Doggerland Weapons Carved from Human Bone
About 11,000 years ago, Stone Age hunters in Doggerland crafted sharp weapons out of human bone, a new study finds. Doggerland refers to a vast area between present-day England and the Netherlands that was exposed when the ice sheets covering the land there melted around 18,000 years ago and was submerged by the sea about 12,000 years ago, when the level of the North Sea rose as more Ice Are glaciers melted. When it was above sea level Doggerland was inhabited by herds of animals and humans, whose remains and artifacts sometimes wash ashore in the Netherlands or are dredged up by fishing boats. [Source: Laura Geggel, Live Science, December 24, 2020]
Laura Geggel wrote in Live Science, An analysis of 10 Doggerland bone weapons revealed that eight were carved from red deer (Cervus elaphus) bone and antlers, and two were crafted from human bone. "We expected to find some deer, but humans? It wasn't even in my wildest dreams that there would be humans among them," study lead researcher Joannes Dekker, a Master's student of archaeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, told Live Science.
It's a mystery why these weapons, known as barbed points, were carved from human bone. The research team couldn't think of a practical reason — human bones were likely hard to come by (unlike deer remains) and human bone isn't an especially great material for crafting sharp weapons — deer antler is much better, Dekker said. Rather, "there were probably cultural rules on what species to use for barbed point production," he said. "We think it was a conscious choice ... [that had to do] with the connotations and associations that people had with those [deceased] people as symbols."
The study on the Doggeland bones was published in the February 2021 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. Dekker noted his study was small, and only larger analyses may reveal how common human bone weapons were in Mesolithic Doggerland. It's also unclear which anatomical bone they came from, but one of the long leg or arm bones would have probably worked best, given the weapons' sizes, he said. One thing is clear: These bones were carved soon after the person's death, because fresh human bones are much easier to carve than dry, brittle ones, Dekker said. Although "the use of human bone for bone tools is so rare," it's not without precedent, Dekker said.New Guinea warriors, for instance, used daggers made from human thigh bones, but only from very important people.
Doggerland Landscape and Climate
Jason Urbanus wrote in Archaeology Magazine: The floor of the North Sea is now recognized as the largest well-preserved prehistoric archaeological landscape in the world. It would have been a paradise for the bands of hunter-gatherers who followed the retreating ice sheets into the region to settle there. They, however, were not Doggerland’s first inhabitants. Millennia prior to their arrival, the North Sea basin had belonged to Neanderthals, who lived there for hundreds of thousands of years. During the last Ice Age, between roughly 125,000 and 15,000 years ago, Doggerland was part of the cold and dry mammoth steppe. Because vast quantities of water were trapped in glacial ice sheets, the North Sea was around 450 feet lower than it is today. It was a mostly treeless, grassy plain that attracted mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses as well as herds of reindeer, horses, and aurochs. [Source: Jason Urbanus, Archaeology Magazine, March/April 2022]
After tens of thousands of years of dramatic shifts in the climate, with alternating warm and cold periods, around 10,000 years ago temperatures began to steadily climb. This marked the end of the Ice Age and ushered in today’s current warm period, known as the Holocene Epoch. As the glaciers melted, water inundated Doggerland, creating rivers, lakes, and marshes. Trees sprouted, growing into forests of pine and birch, and later, oak, hazel, and elm. Mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and saber-toothed cats gradually disappeared and were replaced by countless new species. Gone, too, were the Neanderthals. In this blossoming landscape, Mesolithic hunter-gatherers arrived and flourished. “During the Holocene, Doggerland was a wooded environment, but with really extensive coastlines and enormous wetlands. These were the richest areas to live in,” says Amkreutz. “There were forest resources—deer, wild boar, and berries—but also fish, migrating birds, otters, and beavers. It was a Garden of Eden for them, a wetland wonderland.”
In the end, the same forces that transformed Doggerland into the paradise that it was for Mesolithic hunter-gatherers — climate change and melting glaciers — also spelled its demise. When the Ice Age ended and water began to inundate the North Sea basin, it didn’t stop for thousands of years. Over a 3,000-year period, the sea level rose an average of six feet every century. Doggerland was drowning. Around 6100 B.C., a massive tsunami caused by an underwater landslide off the coast of Norway struck Doggerland, exacerbating the situation. Dogger Bank, one of the highest points on the landscape, was one of the last pieces of dry land to survive. It temporarily existed as an island before it, too, slipped under the sea. The richest landscape in northwest Europe had vanished. A short time later, so would the last of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.
Doggerland Camps
Mammoth skull found in the North Sea
Images of Doggerland created using seismic data shows one of Doggerland’s many river channels which have recognized as being likely locations of human activity.Laura Spinney wrote in National Geographic: “There were numerous camps in the estuary at any one time, Bell believes, each of which was inhabited by an extended family group of perhaps ten individuals. The camps were not permanently occupied. The oldest one would have been submerged at very high tides, so it’s clear the visitors were seasonal, and that each time they returned they built their camp a little higher up the slope. The remarkable thing is that they kept coming back, over centuries and possibly millennia, finding their way through a landscape that was changing beyond all recognition. They would have witnessed the engulfing and death of the oak forest. “There would have been a time when colossal oak trees were sticking up, dead, through the salt marsh,” says Bell. “It would have been a weird sort of landscape.” [Source: Laura Spinney, National Geographic, December 2012]
“Summer and autumn would have been times of plenty at the coast, with grazing on the marsh attracting wild animals to hunt. There would be good fishing, and hazelnuts and berries in abundance. At other times the groups moved up to higher country, probably following the valleys of the Severn’s tributaries. With only an oral culture, older individuals would have been vital repositories of environmental knowledge, able to read the migration patterns of birds, for example, and so tell their group when the season had come to leave for the coast or head for the highlands—decisions on which their survival depended.
“Finds of much larger concentrations of artifacts suggest that Mesolithic people, like later North American hunter-gatherers, came together for annual social events—possibly in the early autumn, when the seals came in and the salmon were running. In western Britain, these gatherings took place on cliff tops, overlooking sealing grounds. They would have allowed young men and women from localized groups to find mates, and information to be exchanged about other river systems beyond each group’s territory—knowledge that became crucial as the sea continued to disrupt the landscape.
“The most rapid rises of sea level were on the order of three to six feet a century, but because of the variable topography of the land, the flooding would not have been even. In areas as flat as modern-day East Anglia, a six-foot rise could have shifted the coast inland by miles; in hillier places, less. Down in low-lying Doggerland, the rising sea turned inland lakes into estuaries. Gaffney’s digital reconstruction shows that one in particular, the Outer Silver Pit, contains massive sandbanks that could only have been created by fierce tidal currents. At some point the currents would have made it dangerous to cross in a log boat, and eventually, created a permanent barrier to once familiar hunting grounds.”
Mapping Doggerland
Jason Urbanus wrote in Archaeology Magazine: Doggerland remained frustratingly inaccessible to archaeologists as the deep, murky waters of the North Sea impeded exploration by divers. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, 70 years after the discovery of the Colinda harpoon, there remained just as many questions about Doggerland as answers. The investigation into it had reached a dead end. “People said, ‘We know there is something out there, but we can’t do anything about it, so let’s move on,’” says University of Bradford archaeologist Vince Gaffney. Doggerland remained tantalizingly close, yet still very far away. [Source: Jason Urbanus, Archaeology Magazine, March/April 2022]
Before researchers could determine if and where any archaeological sites might have survived within Doggerland, they had to figure out where its people lived. The North Sea basin covers tens of thousands of square miles, stretching from England to Scandinavia. Since it was nearly impossible to formulate an accurate idea of what Doggerland’s landscape looked like when the last Ice Age ended, it was challenging to know where to even begin looking. According to Gaffney, even with all the technology available today, very little is known about Earth’s oceans and seafloors. “We know more about the surface of the moon,” he says.
The red line marks Dogger Bank, most likely a moraine formed by Ice Age glaciers
Laura Spinney wrote in National Geographic: “Thanks to a team of landscape archaeologists at the University of Birmingham led by Vince Gaffney, we now have a good idea of what this lost country looked like. Based on seismic survey data gathered mostly by oil companies prospecting under the North Sea, Gaffney and his colleagues have digitally reconstructed nearly 18,000 square miles of the submerged landscape—an area larger than the Netherlands. [Source: Laura Spinney, National Geographic, December 2012]
“At the university’s IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Centre, which he heads, Gaffney projects images of this terra incognita onto huge, full-color screens. Just off the map, the Rhine and the Thames met and flowed south into the Channel River. Gaffney sweeps a hand across other river systems, comparably large, that we have no names for. In the climate of the day—perhaps a couple of degrees warmer than today—the contours on his screen translate into gently rolling hills, wooded valleys, lush marshes, and lagoons. “It was a paradise for hunter-gatherers,” he says.
“The publication in 2007 of the initial section of this map allowed archaeologists for the first time to “see” the Mesolithic world, even identify likely locations for settlements, with a view to potentially excavating them. The expense of underwater archaeology and the poor visibility in the North Sea have kept those settlements tantalizingly out of reach, at least for now. But the archaeologists have other ways to reveal who the Doggerlanders were, and how they responded to the inexorable creep of the sea into their homeland.”
Oil and Gas Industry Helps Doggerland Mappers
Jason Urbanus wrote in Archaeology Magazine: To try to solve nagging problem of a lack of sesimic data, Gaffney and a small group of colleagues turned to a resource not commonly used by archaeologists — offshore commercial oil and gas companies. For decades, the petroleum industry had conducted seismic reflection surveys of the North Sea to locate and map mineral deposits. To do this, sound and shock waves are transmitted from a ship and aimed at the seafloor. As they strike different contours, subtleties, and anomalies in the Earth’s crust, the seismic waves are reflected back to the ship at different frequencies and recorded. This data can then be used to produce 2-D and 3-D maps. [Source: Jason Urbanus, Archaeology Magazine, March/April 2022]
Gaffney acknowledges that the team’s unlikely appeal to the petroleum industry seemed like a long shot. This was especially the case as the technology was designed to probe deposits much deeper under the seafloor, and it was far from certain that it could be used in the way the researchers hoped. “We were a bunch of nobody archaeologists going in and saying, ‘We are looking for a land that nobody has ever seen. Could you just give us some of your data, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars to collect, and can we have it for free?’” Gaffney says. Fortunately for him, he had a colleague who had a contact at one such company, Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS).
PGS agreed to hand over what it considered a tiny amount of data on an area of 2,300 square miles. It was the largest geophysical survey ever made available to archaeologists. Within weeks, the outlines of a huge river that ran across the Dogger Bank 10,000 years ago began to appear on a computer screen. This was the very first image of Doggerland. To the surprise of many, more and more of the landscape was gradually pieced together. “People thought we were misinterpreting the data because we were archaeologists,” Gaffney says. “But at that point, we knew it was going to work.”
In the 15 years since those early images came to light, researchers have obtained increasing amounts of data. The map of Doggerland has expanded, and it now encompasses an area of more than 17,000 square miles. Computer models have revealed thousands of miles of rivers and coastline, dozens of freshwater lakes and estuaries, and many hills and valleys. Soil and pollen analysis of sediment cores and peat samples has provided further information about the region’s climate, vegetation, and wildlife.
Doggerland Archaeology
Doggerland landscape revealed during an exceptionally low tide
Jason Urbanus wrote in Archaeology Magazine: In the nearly a century following the Colinda harpoon’s discovery, fishing vessels have recovered many additional Mesolithic artifacts. Hundreds more have been plucked from beaches in the Netherlands. Over the past 50 years, Dutch authorities have carried out immense land reclamation projects, both to reinforce the sandy barriers of their low-lying coastlines and to expand harbor infrastructure in and around Rotterdam. This has involved extracting massive amounts of sand from the bottom of the North Sea and redistributing it along the Dutch shoreline. During this process, archaeological evidence is sucked up along with the sand and sprayed onto the beaches at places such as Sand Motor and Maasvlakte I and II, where they are then harvested by collectors and brought to the attention of experts such as Amkreutz. “I am sometimes amazed by the sheer number of finds,” he says. “If you assume this is a vast natural landscape, it is quite surprising how many of the objects have been touched or made by human hands.” [Source: Jason Urbanus, Archaeology Magazine, March/April 2022]
Laura Spinney wrote in National Geographic: “There are the treasures brought up in the fishermen’s nets. In addition to the human jawbone, Glimmerveen has accumulated more than a hundred other artifacts—animal bones showing signs of butchery and tools made from bone and antler, among them an ax decorated with a zigzag pattern. Because he has the coordinates of these finds, and because objects on the seabed tend not to move far from where erosion liberates them, he can be confident that many come from a specific area of the southern North Sea that the Dutch call De Stekels (the Spines), characterized by steep seabed ridges. “The site or sites must have been close to a river system,” he says. “Maybe they lived on river dunes.” [Source: Laura Spinney, National Geographic, December 2012]
“Another way to understand the Doggerlanders is to excavate shallow-water or intertidal sites of similar age nearby. In the 1970s and 1980s a site called Tybrind Vig, a few hundred yards off the coast of a Danish island in the Baltic Sea, yielded evidence of a surprisingly advanced late Mesolithic fishing culture, including finely decorated canoe paddles and several long, thin canoes, one of them over 30 feet long. More recently, Harald Lübke, of the Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology in Schleswig, Germany, and his colleagues have excavated a series of underwater settlements in Wismar Bay, on the German Baltic coast, dating between 8,800 and 5,500 years ago. The sites vividly document the people’s shift in diet from freshwater fish to marine species, as the sea rise transformed their land over centuries from inland lakes surrounded by forests, to reedy marshes, to fjords, and eventually to the open bay there now.
“A similar metamorphosis took place at Goldcliff on the Severn estuary in Wales, where archaeologist Martin Bell from the University of Reading and his team have been excavating for 21 years. In the Mesolithic, a narrow, incised valley initially contained the River Severn. As the sea rose, the river spilled over the valley’s sides and spread out—perhaps within as little as a century—creating the outlines of the modern estuary. At some point the estuary would have been dotted with islands.
“One August day, during an exceptionally low tide at Goldcliff, I followed Bell and his co-workers out across the sucking, streaming mudflats, past huge black trunks of prehistoric oaks lying preserved in the mud. We had less than two hours to work before the tide would pour back in. We arrived at an unremarkable ridge that, 8,000 years ago, formed the edge of an island. A team member blasted it with water from a high-pressure hose, and suddenly a sequence of ancient footprints was thrown into relief—39 in all, made by three or four individuals and heading in both directions along the ridge. “They may have been heading out from their campsite to check their fish traps in a nearby channel,” says Bell.
Looking for Doggerland Sites
Jason Urbanus wrote in Archaeology Magazine: Even though there have been tremendous advances in the study of this lost world in recent years, one element has remained elusive — evidence of the sites where people lived in Doggerland. “We now have a good idea of this landscape,” says Gaffney. “We’ve got the animals and the plants. We have to start looking for the people. It has taken us 15 years, but we are now at the point of being able to prospect a settlement. There is one out there somewhere.” [Source: Jason Urbanus, Archaeology Magazine, March/April 2022]
While relatively few Mesolithic sites have been located on land, if Doggerland was indeed the heartland for these early Holocene communities, it stands to reason that many archaeological sites may lie beneath the North Sea. Finding them, though, is no easy task. According to Gaffney, there are no known archaeological settlement sites from any period anywhere in the world located more than eight miles offshore. Pinpointing an archaeological site amid a North Sea landscape of tens of thousands of square miles is akin to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack — if that haystack were also located deep below the ocean’s surface.
But seismic data has now given archaeologists a much better sense of Doggerland’s topography. They know where its rivers, lakes, and coastlines were located, and where its forests were found. They can use this information to speculate about where people may have lived. To Gaffney, the strategy does not deviate much from how he approaches terrestrial landscapes, even though Doggerland lies hundreds of feet underwater. “First we conduct a large-scale assessment, then zoom in on areas of interest,” he says. “I am a landscape archaeologist and I have only ever treated Doggerland as a bit of land. It just happens to be beneath the sea.”
Gaffney and his team knew that the places they were most likely to encounter human activity were located on what had once been high ground close to rich wetland resources. A few years ago, they settled on two target areas for their first attempt at locating a submerged Mesolithic site. One was a shallow, 15-mile-long seafloor ridge known as Brown Bank, where a wealth of archaeological objects, including a 13,000-year-old engraved aurochs bone, had been snared by fishing trawlers in the past. The other was an area along a now-submerged river channel and estuary off the Norfolk coast known as the Southern River. Although the weather did not fully cooperate, cutting the team’s time at sea short, they were able to scoop up sediment deposits from the Southern River estuary site. When they examined the material, they were stunned to find it contained a fragment of a stone tool known as a hammerstone. The artifact itself may not be terribly substantial, as it is just a few inches across, but its impact could be revolutionary. It is the first time that archaeologists have successfully prospected an archaeological site in a deep-sea environment. They have essentially removed layers of hay from the haystack, making the needles easier to find. “This is a real moment,” Gaffney remarks. “If we are on the cusp of doing this in the North Sea, we are on the cusp of doing it anywhere. You could take the methodology and transplant it anywhere.”
This new type of research into Doggerland has the potential to once again dramatically alter the field of European prehistory. “We have a completely intact landscape with a state of preservation that we can often only dream of on land,” Amkreutz says. “I think we will have a lot of exciting discoveries to come. We are barely scratching the surface.”
Doggerland Questions and Theories
Laura Spinney wrote in National Geographic: “How did Mesolithic hunters, so attuned to the rhythm of the seasons, adapt as their world began to dissolve around them? Jim Leary, an archaeologist with English Heritage, has mined the ethnographic literature for parallels with Inuit and other modern hunter-gatherers confronting climate change. For those who learned to exploit the rising sea, becoming skilled boatbuilders and fishermen, the new resource would have been a boon—for a while. But eventually there would come a tipping point, when the loss of territory offset those rich pickings. Older Mesolithic people, those “storehouses of knowledge,” as Leary calls them, would no longer have been able to read subtle seasonal variations in the landscape and help the group plan accordingly. Cut off from ancestral hunting, fishing, or burial grounds, the people would have felt a profound sense of placelessness, says Leary—“like Inuit whose way back is barred by melting ice floes.” [Source: Laura Spinney, National Geographic, December 2012]
““There would have been huge population shifts,” says Clive Waddington of Derbyshire-based Archaeological Research Services Ltd. “People who were living out in what is now the North Sea would have been displaced very quickly.” Some headed for Britain. At Howick in Northumberland, on the cliffs that run along Britain’s northeast coast and would therefore have been the first hills they saw, his team has found the remains of a dwelling that had been rebuilt three times in a span of 150 years. Among the earliest evidence of a settled lifestyle in Britain, the hut dates from around 7900 B.C. Waddington interprets its repeated habitation as a sign of increasing territoriality: the resident people defending their patch against waves of displaced Doggerlanders.
““We know how important the fishing grounds were for the subsistence of these people,” says Anders Fischer, an archaeologist at the Danish Agency for Culture in Copenhagen. “If each generation saw its best fishing grounds disappear, they would have to find new ones, and that would often be in competition with neighboring groups. In societies of low social complexity, where you have no authorities to handle conflicts, it would probably have ended with violence.”
“Migration, territoriality, conflict: stressful ways of adapting to new circumstances, but adaptations nonetheless. There came a time, however, when the sea exhausted the Doggerlanders’ capacity for survival. Some 8,200 years ago, after millennia of incrementally rising seas, a massive release of meltwater from a giant glacial lake in North America, called Lake Agassiz, caused sea levels to jump by more than two feet. By slowing the circulation of warm water in the North Atlantic, this influx of frigid water triggered a sudden plunge in temperature, causing Doggerland’s coasts—if any remained—to be battered by frigid winds. If that were not enough, around the same time, a landslide on the seafloor off the coast of Norway, called the Storegga slide, triggered a tsunami that flooded the coastlines of northern Europe.
“Was the Storegga tsunami the coup de grâce, or had Doggerland already disappeared beneath the sea? Scientists can’t yet be sure. But they do know that sea-level rise slowed down after that. Then, around 6,000 years ago, a new people from the south arrived on the thickly forested shores of the British Isles. They came in boats, with sheep, cattle, and cereals. Today the living descendants of these early Neolithic farmers, equipped with vastly more sophisticated technology than their Mesolithic counterparts, once again look to a future contending with a rising sea.”
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons, except last picture, from The Guardian
Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Ancient Foods ancientfoods.wordpress.com ; Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.
Last updated May 2024