Monday 15th April 2024, 7.30 pm
‘The prehistory of a lost landscape beneath the North Sea: past, present and future’ by Dr James Walker
University of Bradford
NB this talk will be at Histon Baptist Church, Station Road, Histon, Cambridge CB24 9LN and via Zoom.
This is a joint talk arranged by HIAG, FEAG and The Prehistoric Society.
PLEASE NOTE THE VENUE
Free admission at the venue for members; non-members £4.
Members will receive Zoom links automatically without charge a day before the talk.
Non-members may purchase Zoom tickets from our Eventbrite page in advance of the talk.
Beneath the waters of the southern North Sea lies a prehistoric landscape, ‘Doggerland’, which at various points throughout the past would have connected mainland Britain with the European continent. Ten thousand years ago, one could have walked, more or less, from Yorkshire to Denmark on dry (or dryish) land. This landscape was a heartland for northwest Europe at different times throughout prehistory, and yet, archaeologically we still know little about what went on here, who lived there, and what happened to the peoples living in this world now lost to the waves. Archaeologists have known about this landscape for well over a century now, and prehistoric finds along with the remains of long-extinct animals have been dredged from the depths of the sea by fishermen for hundreds of years, but it is only in recent decades that it has become possible to explore this area, and in many ways it remains an archaeological frontier. In this presentation I will talk about some of what we do know about the prehistoric archaeology of the southern North Sea, and show how over time, it has gone from being a place of mystery, to something of a forgotten landscape, before becoming a place of fascination once more. From the first ancient humans to reach Britain, to the final hunter-gatherers and first farmers of northwest Europe, and with stories ranging from early prehistoric seafarers to tsunamis of biblical proportions, Doggerland remains one of the most interesting missing pieces of the archaeological puzzle in our understanding of prehistoric Europe; a place of so many mysteries, and an area in which we have only just begun to scratch the surface.
A Cambridgeshire boy originally, James is a member of the newly established Submerged Landscapes Centre at the University of Bradford, where he works on the Taken At The Flood project. He recently returned from a post in Stavanger, Norway, where he was working on the archaeology of ‘natural’ disasters. In addition to his research on submerged prehistoric landscapes, his interests include questions of environment, adaptation, migration and evolution, the history of prehistory and palaeoanthropology, and the archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers in general
Image credits: Barbed points, courtesy of Rijksmuseum van Oudheden; image of James Walker, courtesy of himself.
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