Resurfacing Doggerland is a project financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and Cultural Heritage Agency (RCE), aimed at the investigation of archaeological and palaeontological remains from the southern North Sea. Between 20,000 and 6000 years ago the area consisted of an extended landscape, called Doggerland, that drastically changed due to climate change and sea-level rise, and ultimately drowned after the last Ice Age. The big question is how this influenced the plants, animals and humans living in that landscape.
The research is a in a sense a detective game. The thousands of finds brought together by collectors scouring the beaches over the past decades, searching for fossil animal remains and tools made by prehistoric humans, are small pieces of a puzzle with an unknown image. Using modern research techniques, we try to extract as much information as possible from these often little appealing fragments. We find out what humans and animals have been eating, which genetic relationships existed, which diseases they carried, what they looked like, what tools were used for and how these were made. And we try to understand how all this was influenced by the changing climate after the last Ice Age. The plant and animal world changed drastically due to climbing temperatures. The coastline shifted continuously due to sea-level rise, ultimately isolating the British Isles from the European mainland.
As much as we can tell about the finds themselves by means of research techniques, as scientists we also need ‘empathy’ – ‘informed fantasy’ is maybe a better characterization – to permit the representation of life in Doggerland. How did those people living there experience all those changes? How did it affect their connection to the landscape? Did it affect their cosmological beliefs? Questions to which the remains left behind do not directly provide answers. The information we get from our scientific methods in fact provides small building blocks for the stories we can tell about Doggerland. In a way, it is a quest comparable to that of visual artist Matt Fratson.
- Hans Peeters, Principal Investigator (Resurfacing Doggerland)
