This popular-science book tells the story of one of the most important, but least known major archaeological sites in Europe: Doggerland. Few people know that the beaches along the North Sea lie on the edge of a vast lost world. A prehistoric landscape that documents almost a million years of human habitation and lay dry for most of that time.
Doggerland is where early hominids left the first footprints in northern Europe, more than 900,000 years ago. Later, for hundreds of thousands of years, it was the scene of ice ages. A world of woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses, horses and reindeer and the successful Neanderthals who hunted them, including Krijn: the first Neanderthal from Doggerland.
At the end of the last Ice Age, the first modern humans also left their traces here, including the famous Leman-and-Ower-Banks spearhead – the first documented Doggerland find – and some of the oldest art in the region. With the onset of the Holocene, our current era, Doggerland’s inhabitants were increasingly confronted with climate change and rising sea levels, just as we are today.
The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers lived in a rich, but constantly changing world – to which they successfully adapted. Ongoing submergence and a huge tsunami around 6150 BC marked the beginning of the end. A few centuries later, the last islands disappeared under the waves and with them the story of Doggerland was lost in time. This book brings this vanished world back to the surface.
Foreword
Vince Gaffney
First encounters
Leendert Louwe Kooijmans
Following in their footsteps, but choosing my own path
Leo Verhart
PART 1 DOGGERLAND
A lost world rediscovered
Luc Amkreutz
Ice, rivers, sea and spectacle. Geological variation in a drowned landscape
Kim Cohen & Marc Hijma
Mapping a drowning land
Luc Amkreutz, , Kim Cohen, Marc Hijma & Olav Odé
PART 2 DOGGERLAND EARLY INHABITANTS
Stepping into Britain. Happisburgh and the first humans in northern Europe
Nick Ashton
Citizen science and the submerged Palaeolithic landscapes in the North Sea
Rachel Bynoe
Krijn. Face to face with Doggerland’s first Neanderthal
Luc Amkreutz & Luc Anthonis
Neanderthals in the cold ‘North Sea Serengeti’
Marcel Niekus & Dimitri de Loecker
Neanderthal treasures
Marcel Niekus, Dimitri de Loecker & Luc Amkreutz
Modern humans at the end of the Ice Age
Luc Amkreutz & Marcel Niekus
The oldest art. Ice age Expressionism
Luc Amkreutz, Marcel Niekus & Jan Glimmerveen
Animals of the mammoth steppe
Dick Mol, Bram Langeveld & Jørn Zeiler
PART 3 DROWNING DOGGERLAND
Animals after the ice age
Jørn Zeiler
Hunter-gatherers in a rich wetland
Luc Amkreutz & Marcel Niekus
A lucky shot? A red deer in the crosshairs
Marcel Niekus
A thousand hunts. Barbed points from Doggerland
Merel Spithoven
Bouldnor Cliff. A drowned prehistoric site emerging from the seabed
Garry Momber
Rotterdam-Yangtze Harbour. Excavating at 20 metres deep
Dimitri Schiltmans
The North Sea as Highway. Neolithic argonauts and prehistoric trade
Luc Amkreutz & Jan Glimmerveen
PART 4 DOGGERLAND INVESTIGATED
Tracing people. Secrets of bones and teeth unravelled
Eveline Altena, Lisette Kootker, Bjørn Smit & Paul Storm
Points of animal and human bone. Sorting with collagen
Joannes Dekker, Virginie Sinet-Mathiot, Alexander Verpoorte, Marie Soressi & Frido Welker
Europe’s Lost Frontiers. Mapping the landscape
Vince Gaffney & Simon Fitch
On course to the Brown Bank. Research in the North Sea
Tine Missiaen & Ruth Plets
PART 5 DOGGERLAND TODAY
Collecting Doggerland. Searching along the coast, making finds and then?
Luc Amkreutz, Rachel Bynoe, Bjørn Smit & Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof
The North Sea. The busiest sea in the world
Luc Amkreutz & Stichting de Noordzee
Future for Doggerland? Collect, research and protect
Hans Peeters & Bjørn Smit
Thinking of Doggerland. A vanished landscape remembered
Luc Amkreutz & Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof
Afterword
Hans Peeters
Further reading
Luc Amkreutz (1978) studied Prehistory at the University of Leiden. In 2004 he graduated cum laude with a study of the earliest farmers in the Netherlands (Linearbandkeramik) and their settlements along the river Meuse. From 2004 to 2008 he was involved in the Malta Harvest project 'From Hardinxveld to Noordhoorn - from Forager to Farmer', that, from a broad and multi-disciplinary perspective, analysed the Neolithisation process in the Lower Rhine Area. From 2008 onwards he has been working at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (National Museum of Antiquities) in Leiden as curator of the Prehistory of the Netherlands.
Dr. Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof was awarded a NWO research grant for her PhD project entitled Constructing powerful identities. The conception and meaning of ‘rich’ Hallstatt burials in the Low Countries (800-500 BC).
She obtained her Research Master cum laude in 2012, and her RMA thesis was nominated both for the W.A. van Es Prize for Dutch Archaeology (2012) and the Leiden University thesis prize (2012). As a student, and later as a research assistant she was involved in the Ancestral Mounds project of Dr. David Fontijn. She also worked on the design and construction of the exhibition “Archaeology of the Netherlands” during a yearlong internship at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities.
