The sandbank called Dogger Bank lies within
the North Sea, some 100km from the modern coast of Britain. It comprises a submarine plateau
covering approximately 17,600km² that rises about 45m above the seabed. Peat deposits
and the bones of animals including mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and hyena from differing pre-historic
periods have been regularly trawled from this surface from the 19th century right up to
the present day. It was Clement Reid who first postulated that this wealth of tangible evidence
from Dogger Bank was part of a much bigger picture, forming the northern edge of a huge
plain that once covered the whole of the southern North Sea. For most of the 20th century
this inundated area was referred to as a ‘land-bridge’ between mainland Europe
and Britain, a means to an end rather than of any real intrinsic value in itself. This is
perhaps understandable considering its inaccessibility and it was not until 1998 that a
synthesis of the available data by Professor Bryony Coles, at the University of Exeter,
helped to reignite archaeological interest in the North Sea. She named this prehistoric
landscape that once reached, without a break, from England to Denmark after the bank first
identified by Reid – ‘Doggerland’ and it was this submerged environment
that The University of Birmingham studied in 2007, in its pioneering project to use existing
seismic data collected by commercial companies to map the ancient landscape of the sea bed.
Following the success of this project a partnership was formed with Dyfed Archaeological
Trust and the RCAHMW to gather evidence for submerged landscapes in the study areas of the
Liverpool Bay and the Bristol Channel as illustrated in the map.
|