Doggerland

Map showing hypothetical extent of Doggerland around 8,000 BC

North Sea: Dogger Bank edged red

Doggerland is a name given by archaeologists and geologists to a former landmass in the southern North Sea that connected the island of Europe to Great Britain during and after the last Ice Age. The land surviving until about 6,500 or 6,200 BC, though gradually swallowed by rising sea levels. Geological surveys have suggested that Doggerland was a large area of dry land that stretched from Britain's east coast across to the present coast of the Netherlands and the western coasts of Germany and Denmark.

Doggerland was in its time probably a rich habitat with human habitation in the Mesolithic period.

The archaeological potential of the area had first been discussed in the early 20th century, but interest intensified in 1931 when a commercial trawler operating between the sandbanks and shipping hazards of the Leman Bank and Ower Bank east of the Wash dragged up an elegant barbed antler point that dated to a time when the area was tundra. Later vessels have dragged up mammoth and lion remains, among other remains of land animals, and small numbers of prehistoric tools and weapons that were used by the region's inhabitants.

Formation

Before the first glacial period of the current Pleistocene-Holocene Ice Age the Rhine river flowed northwards through the North Sea bed at a time when the North Sea was dry. It is thought that a Cenozoic silt deposit in East Anglia is the bed of an old course of the Rhine. The Weald was twice as long as it is now and stretched across the present Strait of Dover; the modern Boulonnais landform in France is a remnant of its eastern end.

As the ice spread, the ice sheets of when Scandinavia and northern Britain met and formed a giant ice dam, a large proglacial lake formed behind it, which received the river drainage and ice melt from much of northern Europe and Baltic drainage through the Baltic River System. The impounded water eventually overflowed over the Weald into the English Channel and cut a deep gap which sea erosion widened gradually into the Straits of Dover.

During the Last Glacial Maximum that occurred around 18,000 years ago, the North Sea and almost all of the British Isles were covered with glacial ice and the sea level was about 400 feet lower than it is today. The climate warmed but much of the North Sea and English Channel was still an expanse of low-lying tundra, extending around 12,000 BC.

Evidence including the contours of the present seabed shows that after the first main Ice Age the watershed between North Sea drainage and English Channel drainage extended east from East Anglia then southeast to the Hook of Holland, not across the Strait of Dover, and that the River Thames, the Meuse, Scheldt and Rhine rivers joined and flowed along the English Channel dry bed as a wide slow river which at times flowed far before reaching the Atlantic Ocean. At about 8000 BC, the north-facing coastal area of Doggerland had a coastline of lagoons, saltmarshes, mudflats, and beaches, and inland streams and rivers and marshes, and sometimes lakes. It may have been the richest hunting, fowling and fishing ground in Europe available to the Mesolithic culture of the time.

One big river system in Doggerland found by 3D seismic survey was the 'Shotton River', which drained the southeast part of the "Dogger Hills" (today's Dogger Bank) into the east end of the Outer Silver Pit lake. The river is named after Birmingham geologist Frederick William Shotton.

Disappearance

After the end of the ice age, sea levels rose and the land in southern Britain sank, and Doggerland became submerged beneath the expanding North Sea, and in about 6,500 BC, Europe was entirely cut off from Britain. The Dogger Bank, which had been an upland area of Doggerland, is believed to have remained as an island in the North Sea until at least 5000 BC.

Before it flooded completely, Doggerland was a wide undulating plain containing complex meandering river systems, with associated channels and lakes.

A recent hypothesis is that much of the remaining coastal land, already much reduced in size from the original land area, was flooded by a tsunami around 6200 BC, caused by a submarine landslide off the coast of Norway known as the Storegga Slide (traces of which are found on the coasts of the Highlands and of Norway). This theory suggests "that the Storegga Slide tsunami would have had a catastrophic impact on the contemporary coastal Mesolithic population. An extension of this dramatic theory suggests that the tsunami itself made Britain at last an island, though this is a fringe idea.

Discovery and investigation by archaeologists

The remains of plants brought to the surface from Dogger Bank had been studied as early as 1913 by palaeobiologist Clement Reid and the remains of animals and worked flints from the Neolithic period had been found around the fringes of the area. In his book The Antiquity of Man, published in 1915, anatomist Sir Arthur Keith had discussed the archaeological potential of the area. In 1931, the trawler Colinda hauled up a lump of peat whilst fishing near the Ower Bank, 25 miles east of Norfolk. The peat was found to contain a barbed antler point, possibly used as a harpoon or fish spear, 8½ inches long, later identified to date from between 4,000 and 10,000 BC, when the area was tundra. The tool was exhibited in the Castle Museum in Norwich.

"Doggerland" was so named only in 1990 by Professor Bryony Coles, who reinvigorated interest in the area by her work. She named the area "Doggerland" "after the great banks in the southern North Sea" and produced a series of speculative maps of the area. Although Professor Coles recognised that the current relief of the southern North Sea seabed is not a sound guide to the topography of Doggerland, the topography of the area has more recently begun to be reconstructed more authoritatively using seismic survey data obtained through petrochemical exploration surveys.

A skull fragment of a Neanderthal, dated at over 40,000 years old, was recovered from material dredged from the Middeldiep, a region of the North Sea some 10 miles off the coast of Zeeland.

In March 2010 it was reported that recognition of the potential archaeological importance of the area could affect the future development of offshore wind farms in the North Sea.

In popular culture

• The "Mammoth Journey" episode of the BBC television programme Walking with Beasts is partly set on the dry bed of the southern North Sea.
• The area featured in the "Britain's Drowned World" episode of the Channel 4 Time Team documentary series.
• The first chapter of Edward Rutherfurd's epic novel Sarum describes the flooding of Doggerland.
• The legend "The Cormorants of Utrøst" describes a sunken land in the Norwegian Sea (not in the North Sea).
• Science fiction author Stephen Baxter's Northland trilogy is set in an alternative timeline in which Doggerland (Northland in the books) is never inundated.

Outside links

("Wikimedia Commons" has material about Doggerland)

• BBC: The moment Britain became an island
• BBC Radio 4: Doggerland
• University of Birmingham: North Sea Paleolandscapes website
• Doggerland on Zinken
• English Heritage: North Sea coastal peat resource database
• Map of North Sea area shortly before the Dogger Bank island was cut off from the mainland
• Doggerland: A project aiming to mark Doggerland on the contemporary map of Europe
• CGI images (2 stills and a film) of a Mesolithic camp beside the Shotton River, and a list of relevant links to press releases.

References

Books

• The Rediscovery of Doggerland, by Vincent Gaffney, Simon Fitch & David Smith, Council for British Archaeology, 2009, ISBN 190277177X
• Doggerland: a Speculative Survey, by B.J.Coles, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 64 1998 pp 45–81.
• Mapping Doggerland: The Mesolithic Landscapes of the Southern North Sea, V. Gaffney, K. Thomson and S. Fitch (editors), 2007, Archaeopress.
• Discussed in depth in chapters 2-4 in Before Scotland: The Story of Scotland Before History, Alistair Moffat, 2005, Thames & Hudson Inc. ISBN 978-0-500-05133-7