Doggerland

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Satellite image of the North Sea .
The Dogger Bank is outlined in red .

The Doggerland is the country which during the last cold periods England with continental Europe and Scandinavia combined. Today the North Sea lies in this area . The Doggerland was settled by hunters and gatherers in the Mesolithic .

designation

The name Doggerland is derived from the Doggerbank , an extensive shoal in the North Sea , around 100 kilometers from the British east coast and 125 to 150 kilometers from the Danish west coast. Bryony J. Coles made it known in 1998 as the name for the sunken land area that she archaeologically identified.

The term was already in use in Germany when National Socialist ideologues wanted to locate an ideal original home of the Germanic peoples there without archaeological and geological evidence .

topography

Comparison of the geographic situation in the year 2000 with the period of the greatest expansion of the ice sheet during the Weichsel-Würm Ice Age.
Sea level 8,000 years ago until today
Sea level 20,000 years ago until today

The Doggerland had an area of ​​approximately 23,000 square kilometers 10,000 years ago (8000 BC)  . It was located in the southern North Sea and connected continental Europe with the area that is now the east coast of England. During the last glacial period, the southern part of the North Sea - between the Dogger Bank and the English Channel - was an inland lake into which the Thames , Meuse , Rhine and northern European glaciers drained. The outflow from the lake flowed through the area of ​​the then dry English Channel into the Atlantic. Thus it formed the largest river in Europe.

During the Vistula Ice Age, enormous amounts of water were bound in the ice of the glaciers: the sea level was up to 120 meters lower, and the coastlines ran around 600 kilometers north about 12,000 years ago than today ( regression ). Large parts of today's North Sea formed the Doggerland in the Mesolithic. Doggerland was largely not covered by the northern ice sheets during the Vistula Ice Age. It was covered by tundra on permafrost , and a hilly landscape was formed by solifluction . At the end of the Vistula Ice Age, sea level was around 60 meters below today's sea level. The coast ran north of Doggerland. The British Isles and mainland Europe formed a contiguous land mass.

Downfall

When it got warmer at the beginning of the Holocene , the sea level rose in two millennia (10,000 years ago to 8,000 years ago) by 35 meters (from 60 meters below today's sea ​​level to 25 meters below sea level), i.e. by almost two centimeters per year. These changes were triggered by the collapse of the North American inland ice , which was then the largest ice sheet in the northern hemisphere. At the beginning of the Middle Holocene, this contributed to a rapid rise in sea levels of around 120 meters (compared to the minimum level of the Ice Age). On the one hand, this was accompanied by the flooding of further coastal areas, and ultimately today's coastlines were formed ( Flemish Transgression , Dunkirk Transgression ). On the other hand, some side basins of the Atlantic were flooded and thus became side seas.

The rapidly rising North Sea flooded the coasts of Doggerland, the highest part became an island. About 8200 years ago, a large part of the remaining Doggerland Island was flooded in the Storegga event by at least four 8 to 9 meter high tsunami waves . The rise in sea level was less rapid in the period that followed. The Wadden Sea was formed around the same time, and in the following time phases of greater water rise ( transgression ) alternated with phases of water subsidence ( regression ).

Research history

Reports previously attracted attention that old tree stumps appeared in the ebb mud on a spring tide close to the coast of England. They were called “Noah's Forests” by the British until the 20th century and gave rise to all kinds of speculations.

Since the North Sea was systematically fished with trawls , the bones of land animals have repeatedly been entangled. The British paleobotanist Clement Reid (1853–1916) began to systematically investigate the unusual finds at the end of the 19th century. He tried to depict the coastline and the course of the rivers.

In September 1931, fishermen found a large piece of peat in their trawls that revealed a 21.6 centimeter long prehistoric harpoon made of bones with ornate decorations, the origin of which according to C14 dating to around 11,740 BC. Is estimated.

In 1998, Bryony J. Coles, Associate Professor at the Archaeological Faculty of Exeter University , published the first results of her research and initiated the Doggerland Project . This promotes further interdisciplinary research into the sunken part of the country: The focus is on the evaluation of geological investigations in the North Sea and other data and their interpretation with regard to the cultural and historical development of the northern European population from the late Paleolithic to the Neolithic . A first result is a computer model of Doggerland, the next step is the preparation of a targeted archaeological investigation of possible living spaces .

In 2007, the University of Birmingham reproduced a flat land mass of around 23,000 square kilometers in a computer model as part of the Mapping Doggerland research project by Vincent Gaffney and his colleagues at the Visual and Spatial Technology Center (VISTA) . It comprised an extensive network of rivers, a large number of small lakes and a central freshwater lake. The data for the project was provided by the Norwegian company Petroleum Geo-Services ASA (PGS), whose core business is the geophysical investigation of seabeds. Among the numerous rivers , the Shotton River named after Fred Shotton (1906-1990) and the large inland lake Outer Silver Pit , which later mutated into a huge delta system of several rivers and is still today as a valley on the, marked themselves 10 m under the silt of the Dogger Bank Bottom of the North Sea is emerging.

In August 2011, the German Federal Government placed an order for the systematic archaeological prospecting of the North Sea, also outside the 12 nautical mile zone , to the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven, as numerous archaeological sites are threatened by planned construction projects.

An atlas of Doggerland was presented at the 2012 summer meeting of the British Royal Society . According to C. Richard Bates , geochemist at the University of St. Andrews , this documents that the land was significantly larger than previously assumed.

The Doggerland as a living space

Harpoon shapes from the Stone Age, here from the Magdalenian , partly with inserted microliths (1: Mas d'Azil ; 2: Bruniquel ; 3, 4, 5: La Madeleine ; 6, 7: Lortet )

For the Mesolithic people, the Dogger Bank was a straight 90 meter high, elongated elevation; mainland Europe was still largely recovering from the retreating ice sheets, so that the land area could have provided optimal conditions for human settlement in the Mesolithic up to 8000 years ago. In the warmer climate of the Holocene, the tundra vegetation of the Ice Age increasingly gave way to forest cover with birch and pine trees . The tundra shifted its belt of vegetation to the north. Previous research suggests a land mass that was inhabited by Mesolithic hunters and gatherers until around 8,000 years ago, according to isolated archaeological finds .

The taiga-like landscape offered optimal living conditions for animals and plants in the Mesolithic, with a rich food supply, especially in and along the numerous rivers and the large inland lake. Intensive fishing took place here. During the Mesolithic, people in Central Europe lived largely from hunting individual prey - instead of on herds as in the Paleolithic Age - and from vegetable food. Living behavior was probably already characterized by reduced mobility with an increasing concentration of seasonal living spaces on coasts and along watercourses as well as more complex and more hierarchically structured social structures.

The Doggerland disappeared around 8000 years ago: At first, the riverbank meadows became too salty, became more and more humid until they were completely under water and the Mesolithic inhabitants had to look for new habitats. With the retreat of the Ice Age glaciers, sea levels rose, the land rose, the habitable area shrank on the one hand, and the ice sheets released new land on the other.

reception

The film A Mammoth Company , the fifth part of the BBC documentary The Heirs of the Saurians , is partly set on the dry North Sea, as is the episode Britain's Drowned World of Channel 4's archeology documentary Time Team .

literature

  • Vincent L. Gaffney, Kenneth Thomson, Simon Fitch (Eds.): Mapping Doggerland. The Mesolithic Landscapes of the Southern North Sea , Archaeopress, Oxford 2007, ISBN 978-190-573-5 .
  • Bryony J. Coles: Doggerland, the cultural dynamics of a shifting coastline . In: K. Pye, SRL Allen (Ed.): Coastal and Estuarine Environments. Sedimentology, Geomorphology and Geoarchaeology. In: Geological Society Special Publication No. 175, 2000, pp. 393-401, ISBN 1-86239-070-3 .
  • Bryony J. Coles: Doggerland's loss and the Neolithic. In: B. Coles, J. Coles, M. Schon Jorgensen (Eds.): Bog Bodies, Sacred Sites and Wetland Archeology. WARP Occasional Paper 12. Exeter 1999, pp. 51-57, ISBN 0-9519117-5-9 .
  • Bryony J. Coles: Doggerland, a speculative survey . In: Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. Awarded Baguley Prize, London 1998, pp. 45-81, ISSN  0079-497X .
  • Laura Spinney: Archeology. The lost world. In: Nature . 2008, 454, July 2008, pp. 151-153, doi : 10.1038 / 454151a .
  • Simon Fitch, Vince Gaffney, Ken Thomson: In sight of Doggerland: From speculative survey to landscape exploration. In: Internet Archeology 22, No. 3, October 2, 2007.

Web links

Commons : Doggerland  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c B. J. Coles: Doggerland. A speculative survey. In: Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. Awarded Baguley Prize, London 1998, pp. 45-81, ISSN  0079-497X
  2. ↑ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity, New York University Press 2002, 139
  3. ↑ Marc Hijma: The southern North Sea? Rhine-Thames land! In: Jan Mees, Jan Seys (eds.): Book of abstracts - VLIZ Young Scientists' Day , VLIZ Special Publication 67, Brugge 2014, pp. 170–173.
  4. ↑ Berliner Morgenpost (September 16, 2006): The English Channel was a river 20,000 years ago
  5. ↑ Gregor C. Falk: The paleogeomorphology of selected locations on the Schleswig-Holstein North Sea coast in the Early and Middle Holocene. ( Memento from July 15, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF) Berlin: Faculty 07 - Environment and Society at the Technical University of Berlin 2001, dissertation, p. 20.
  6. ↑ Gregor C. Falk: The paleogeomorphology of selected locations on the Schleswig-Holstein North Sea coast in the Early and Middle Holocene. ( Memento from July 15, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF) Berlin: Faculty 07 - Environment and Society at the Technical University of Berlin 2001, dissertation, p. 21.
  7. ↑ Bernhard Weninger, Rick Schulting, Marcel Bradtmöller, Lee Clare, Mark Collard, Kevan Edinborough, Johanna Hilpert, Olaf Jöris, Marcel Niekus, Eelco J. Rohling, Bernd Wagner: The catastrophic final flooding of Doggerland by the Storegga Slide tsunami. In: Documenta Praehistorica XXXV 2008.
  8. ^ Karl Heinz Behre: The fluctuations of the mean high tide on the German North Sea coast in the last 3000 years according to archaeological data. In: Coastline Reports. Leiden 2004.1. ISSN  0928-2734
  9. ↑ a b Angelika Franz: Atlantis in the North Sea. in: Epoc . Spectrum, Heidelberg 2009,2, 86f. ISSN  1865-5718
  10. ^ C. Reid: Submerged Forests. Cambridge University Press, 1913.
  11. ^ Western Kentucky University: Chrono-Biographical Sketch Clement Reid (English).
  12. ^ Clement Reid: Submerged Forests. 1913.
  13. ↑ JGD Clark: The Mesolithic Settlement of Northern Europe. Cambridge: University Press, 1936.
  14. ↑ The lost world: Doggerland ( Memento from December 12, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  15. ^ University of Exeter, Department of Archeology: Prof Bryony Coles BA MPhil FSA
  16. ^ BJ Coles: Doggerland's loss and the Neolithic. In: B. Coles, J. Coles, M. Schou Jorgensen (Eds.): Bog Bodies, Sacred Sites and Wetland Archeology , 12th Department of Archeology, University of Exeter: WARP (Wetland Archeology Research Project) Occasional Paper 1999, p 51-57.
  17. ↑ a b c The University of Exeter, Department of Archeology: Doggerland Project (English)
  18. ↑ VISTA website, Vincent Gaffney ( Memento from September 15, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
  19. ↑ Vincent Gaffney, Kenneth Thomson, Simon Fitch, Mapping Doggerland: The Mesolithic Landscapes of the Southern North Sea, University of Birmingham, 2007
  20. ↑ Vincent Gaffney, Simon Fitch, David Smith, Europe's Lost World: The rediscovery of Doggerland, University of Birmingham, 2009
  21. ↑ Petroleum Geo-Services (English)
  22. ^ Search for submerged cultures in the North Sea ( Memento from May 12, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Radio Bremen (accessed on August 12, 2011).
  23. ↑ Axel Bajanowski, Stone Age: Map shows the sunken heart of Europe , in: spiegel-online of July 6, 2012.
  24. ↑ Hubert H. Lamb: The course of postglacial climate. In: Anthony F. Harding (Ed.): Climate change in the later prehistory. Edinburgh 1982, pp. 11-33, ISBN 0-85224-425-8 .
  25. ^ W. Patterson: Coastal Catastrophe. ( Memento of April 9, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) University of Saskatchewan (paleoclimate research document) ( PDF file, English; 446 kB).
  26. ↑ Channel 4: Britain's Drowned World , Time Team, first broadcast on April 24, 2007 (English).