Great Britain: The Intertidal and Underwater Archaeology of Britain’s Submerged Landscapes

Abstract

The submerged landscapes around Great Britain are extensive and would have offered productive territory for hunting, gathering, exploitation of aquatic and marine resources, and-in the final stages of postglacial sealevel rise-opportunities for agriculture. They would also have provided land connections to continental Europe and opportunities for communication by sea travel along now-submerged palaeocoastlines and river estuaries. Most of the archaeological material has been discovered in intertidal or shallow water conditions, but there are also discoveries in deeper water, with dates ranging from earliest human presence nearly one million years ago up to the establishment of modern sea level. Some later material is present where coastlines have continued to sink in more recent millennia. Intertidal sites are especially well represented

Not a bathtub: A consideration of sea-level physics for archaeological models of human migration

“…The English Channel is thought to have been formed by a series of megafloods (Gibbard, 2007;Gupta et al, 2007) and a land connection between Britain and continental Europe was intermittently flooded and exposed through subsequent ice age cycles. This region also carries relevance for studies of human settlement patterns, as the area was likely a hub for resources, hunting and gathering, communication, and sea travel when it was periodically exposed (and not covered by ice sheets) going back to the late Pleistocene (Coles, 1998(Coles, , 2000Gaffney and Thomson, 2007;Bailey et al, 2020). Similar to the Sunda and Sahul region, Doggerland (the region encompassing the now-submerged connection between Britain and continental Europe) is shallow and therefore sensitive to slight changes in sea level.…”

Coastal curios? An analysis of ex situ beach finds for mapping new Palaeolithic sites at Happisburgh, UK

“…The possible source of some of these finds from submerged deposits, combined with the ongoing work to locate and ground-truth their parent deposits, is a significant step forward for the discipline of submerged Pleistocene landscapes. The move away from a reliance on chance finds is an important facet of current submerged landscape research (Bailey et al, 2020) and the use of this patterning has begun to direct targeted investigation of offshore deposits for the location of archaeological exposures. These have so far identified areas of in situ CF-bF in the near-shore area off Happisburgh; the first 1 6 100 0 0 0 0 6 1/2 40 100 0 0 0 0 40 2 173 100 0 0 0 0 173 2/3 164 95 8 5 0 0 172 3 4 8 5 9 3 3 4 0 1 1 8 2 Total 431 100 41 100 1 100 473 instance of targeted dives successfully locating submerged Pleistocene deposits of this age (Bynoe et al, forthcoming).…”

A wet strawman: A response to Ward et al.

“…This assumption is sometimes accepted uncritically on the grounds of proximity to the adjacent shoreline and the greater exposure of the shoreline and the intertidal zone to turbulent wave action. However, there are many cases of independently dated sites in the modern intertidal zone in other parts of the world that demonstrably do belong to a pre-inundation land surface, just as there are examples of fully subtidal sites suspected of being displaced from the adjacent land surface and washed into the sea (Bailey, Galanidou, et al, 2020;Bailey, Momber, et al, 2020;Bayón & Politis, 2014;Bicho et al, 2020;Billard et al, 2020;Galanidou et al, 2020;Galili et al, 2020;Glorstad et al, 2020;Jöns et al, 2020;Peeters & Amkreutz, 2020;Pieters et al, 2020;Rossi et al, 2020;Westley & Woodman, 2020). The key issue in every case is not whether artifacts are intertidal or subtidal, but whether they were first discarded by cultural activity on a pre-inundation land surface.…”