Doggerland and the Lost Frontiers Project (2015–2020)

Abstract

As this volume, the final monograph of the SPLASHCOS network, was being finalised, the European Research Council agreed to fund a major new project relating to the marine palaeolandscapes of the southern North Sea. Emerging from the earlier work of the North Sea Palaeolandscapes Project (NSPP), the Lost Frontiers project seeks to go beyond the maps generated by that ground-breaking research. Led by researchers in the fields of archaeogeophysics, molecular biology and computer simulation, the project seeks to develop a new paradigm for the study of past environments, ecological change and the transition between hunter gathering societies and farming in North West Europe. Following from earlier work, the project will seek to release the full potential of the available seismic reflectance data sets to generate topographical maps of the whole of early Holocene Doggerland that are as accurate and complete as possible. Using these data, the study will then reconstruct and simulate the emerging palaeoenvironments of Doggerland using conventional palaeoenvironmental data, as well as ancient DNA extracted directly from sediment cores along the routes of two submerged river valleys. Using this base data, the project aims to transform our understanding of the colonisation and development of floral, faunal and human life, to explore the Mesolithic landscapes and to identify incipient Neolithic signals indicating early contact and development within the region of Doggerland.

Appendix. The Naming of Parts: Doggerland, Agderia or Northsealand?

An increasing interest in the archaeology of the North Sea in recent years has been driven by significant amounts of new fieldwork, collaborations with offshore industry and, more recently, synthetic publications on the subject. All of this has stimulated debate in a fruitful manner. One area of discussion relates to the utility of the name Doggerland for the area under study. There have been proposals to replace this with the term Northsealand (Childe 1957; De Roest 2013, p. 13 note 2; Leary 2015, p. 113) whilst there has also been a suggestion that individual national sectors of the inundated land mass may also be separately named including the proposal to name the Norwegian sector ‘Agderia’ (Hammer et al. 2016). The Lost Frontiers project team has considered such proposals but remains of the opinion that to relinquish the term Doggerland seems unreasonable at this time and it is perhaps worth making some comment on this decision.

The underlying assumption of the proposed change, which as far as can be discerned is primarily mooted by archaeologists, is that somehow archaeology has imposed this name and perhaps that it is in some senses a ‘loaded’ term. There may also be a presumption that this is an English archaeological imposition given the general attribution of the name to Bryony Coles following her seminal paper in 1998. While we were writing this chapter, Professor Coles (2016) published a short paper on how she came to use the term Doggerland and the reasons for doing so. Nevertheless there is still a persistent view that the physical significance of the Dogger Bank as a geographical feature has been overstated and that this undermines its claim for toponymic extrapolation over the wider North Sea area.

At this point we suggest that at least some of the current discussion is confused. To begin with, the assertion regarding the nature of the banks is essentially a misunderstanding of the geomorphological evidence and literature. Whilst it is true that our own work has noted that the profile of the current banks largely reflects post-inundation deposition, this should not be understood as asserting that the area of the banks was topographically insignificant (Gaffney et al. 2009, p. 68). Indeed, the scarp, possibly a moraine feature, on the northern edge of the banks, must have been one of the more prominent features within the North Sea basin and this, separate from the modern Dogger Banks, was presumably associated with the area of the former Dogger Hills. The fact that the scarp was relatively prominent explains why even the earliest regional maps identified this as a significant upstanding coastal feature near the beginning of the Holocene. In geomorphological terms, it is significant, and was probably always significant to the geographical perceptions of the past peoples who lived on the North Sea plain.

The history of the term Doggerland is also intriguing. In respect of the nautical use of the term, Flemming (pers. comm. 2014) has noted that there is a real need for a formal study of the toponymy—the ‘place names’—of the North Sea. The term Dogger does not appear to be English and may refer to a double-masted Dutch ship (from Dogge—trawler?). Its later transformation to a toponym representing a larger landscape is often credited to the archaeologist Bryony Coles. More recently, Leary (2015, p. 113) noted that Vere Gordon Childe referred to the area as Northsealand perhaps as early as 1957. Whilst this earlier claim to precedent may appear to give the discipline the authority to rename the area, archaeologists, in particular, should be cautious when faced with appeals to apparent authority.

In fact, the term Dogger Land (written as two words) seems to have been in use in respect of the inundated landscape as early as 1952 in Bryan P. Beirne’s (1952) volume on the ‘The Origin and History of the British Fauna’, in which chapter VII is entitled ‘The Cambrian Channel and Dogger Land Survivors’. The chapter title has echoes of Clement Reid’s (1899) ‘The Origin of the British Flora’. Given that Reid also brought the issue of the Dogger Bank to the attention of generations of geologists and archaeologists in his later work (Reid 1913), it is possible that there was a continuity of usage extending from Reid into later decades of the twentieth century. In following this line of thought, a Google Ngram search for the term ‘Doggerland’ revealed a number of references that occur from the 1950s but also a number of earlier phytogeographic references including the 1934 Acta Phytogeographioca Suecica (Samuelsson 1934, p. 302). More surprising is the fact that from 1919, only 6 years after the publication of Clement Reid’s work, Arthur Mee, a noted children’s writer, published or commissioned a number of articles on the archaeology and history of the Dogger Bank in the ‘Children’s Newspaper’ (Bryant 1919 ¹). In an edition of the paper published on the 21st of June 1919, an anonymous article, entitled ‘Are the Welsh English?’, states that:

The English came chiefly from Doggerland, in the North Sea, and are of the same stock as the Scandinavians; but the Welsh came mainly from the West of France and the North-west of Spain; and we find that, as a rule, they are darker and shorter. (Anon 1919; Mee 1919, p. 95)

This paper trail suggests that the term Doggerland may have been the product of the work of Arthur Mee and the specialists he commissioned to write for children and that the name has been in use for nearly a century. It is also a sobering thought that, given the very wide circulation of Mee’s popular works (the Children’s Newspaper sold more than 500,000 copies at its peak), the current presumption that knowledge of the archaeology of the North Sea was the preserve of the educated few may be the product of our discipline’s ignorance of the popular literature of the early twentieth century. It is more than likely that nearly a century ago children were discussing the history of the Dogger Banks on the streets of Britain. It is equally clear that the immense digitisation projects of the past decade can now provide access to literature that we had never previously considered but which may hold relevant information on the history of public archaeology. What should certainly be asserted at this time is that the archaeological presumption that we can replace such historic toponyms at whim seems less than appropriate.²

The final issue relates to the proposed use of the name Northsealand. We appreciate that the term Doggerland may be challenged on the basis of its relatively limited regional extent in contrast to the North Sea, which approximates the entire area of concern.³ However, this alone does not justify a change in terminology. There must be an argument that the term Doggerland at least has relevance to a significant geographical feature that would have been of consequence to the people who lived on the plain for the majority of its existence. Uniquely, the area would also have retained significance during the final stages of inundation. During this period, the Dogger Hills would have still existed as one of the last islands in the southern North Sea during a time when most of the surrounding landscape had been submerged and was, perhaps, being slowly forgotten or mythologised. In such circumstances it is not difficult to imagine that the island/hills/banks may have achieved considerable meaning to the peoples whose ancestors had lived on the surrounding plain. Consequently, if we deign to name the lands of those shadowy peoples, then the only longstanding topographic feature that must have retained some level of cultural significance throughout the late Pleistocene and earlier Holocene periods, and presumably was named, was almost certainly the area associated with the Dogger Bank. In contrast to this, the North Sea does not represent a comparable feature. No doubt, the developing seascape was itself significant to the occupants of the plain, although equally the rise of the sea occurred over a period of c.13,000 years, and for much of that time was of no consequence to peoples living far away from the coastline. The North Sea, then, is a later feature and simply overlies the landscape with which we are concerned. It surely has no real claim to precedence in contrast to the Dogger Hills and then the Dogger Island.

Consequently, we argue that archaeologists should retain the use of the term Doggerland in preference to Northsealand—or any other name. The toponym has a history of use which precedes the recent period of archaeological interest, and most likely has a rationale for the people who lived there in respect of the topography of the plain and the history of inundation which led to the later creation of the North Sea. Moreover, in a fundamental manner the North Sea was ultimately the destroyer of a named land and wiped clean millennia of traditions and cultural geography—it should have no further claim on the landscape it so effectively eradicated.