The Last Great Archaeological Challenge? Exploring the Inundated Landscapes of Doggerland

After more than thirty years of study in the southern North Sea, palaeolandscapes research across the area usually referred to as Doggerland has moved from the status of niche interest to an increasingly strategic area of investigation. This change has been driven by the allure of one of the last great archaeological challenges – to explore the vast landscapes lost to the sea after the last ice age. Today, research often parallels the development of coastal shelves for net zero goals or as a response to geopolitical energy crises. Consequently, there is now an imperative to explore landscapes where vital evidence for human occupation is, essentially, absent over very large areas and where access to surviving archaeology is severely limited. At the University of Bradford, researchers at the Submerged Landscapes Research Centre have undertaken a series of large, landscape research projects centred on the Early Holocene in this area, and elsewhere is the world, over the past two decades.
Current marine surveys now approach supranational scales. However, given the global lack of directly, prospected archaeological material in deeper waters, there is an emerging emphasis on the location of human activity within the deeper sectors of the coastal shelves. As more, and better, data has become available, the role of remote sensing, integrated with simulation and modelling, has been central to this task. This lecture introduces the results of this work and considers where future research may lead us.