Doggerland

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the people, plants and animals once living on land now under the North Sea, now called Doggerland after Dogger Bank, inhabited up to c7000BC or roughly 3000 years before the beginnings of Stonehenge. There are traces of this landscape at low tide, such as the tree stumps at Redcar (above); yet more is being learned from diving and seismic surveys which are building a picture of an ideal environment for humans to hunt and gather, with rivers and wooded hills. Rising seas submerged this land as glaciers melted, and the people and animals who lived there moved to higher ground, with the coasts of modern-day Britain on one side and Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium and France on the other.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Vince Gaffney No other episodes
  Anniversary Professor of Landscape Archaeology at the University of Bradford
• Carol Cotterill No other episodes
  Marine Geoscientist at the British Geological Survey
• Rachel Bynoe No other episodes
  Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Southampton

Reading list

• Under the Sea: Archaeology and Palaeolandscapes of the Continental Shelf
  Geoffrey Bailey, Jan Harff and Dimitris Sakellariou, (eds.) (Springer International, 2017) Google Books →
• Submerged Prehistory
  Jonathan Benjamin, Clive Bonsall, Catriona Pickard and Anders Fischer (eds.) (Oxbow Books, 2011) Google Books →
• Submerged Landscapes of the European Continental Shelf: Quaternary Paleoenvironments
  Nicholas C. Flemming, Jan Harff, Delminda Moura, Anthony Burgess and Geoffrey N. Bailey (eds.) (Wiley Blackwell, 2017) Google Books →
• Europe's Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland
  V. Gaffney, S. Fitch, and D. Smith (Council for British Archaeology, 2009) Google Books →
• Mapping Doggerland: The Mesolithic Landscapes of the Southern North Sea
  V. Gaffney, K. Thomson and S. Fitch (eds) (Archaeopress Archaeology, 2007) Google Books →
• Landscape Beneath the Waves: The Archaeological Investigation of Underwater Landscapes
  C. Wickham-Jones (Oxbow Books, 2018) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m0006707

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006707

Auto-category: 930 (History of ancient world)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, Dogger, German Bight, Humber, Thames and Dover had no place in the Stone Age shipping forecasts as they were areas of land, not sea, and ideal habitats for human hunter-gatherers.