Accessing the “Empty Quarter”: Tentative Steps Towards the Peopling of Doggerland

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Hunting for Hunters, Underwater: Results and Future Directions for Submerged Ancient Sites" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

After more than thirty years of study, palaeolandscapes research in the southern North Sea, usually referred to as Doggerland, has moved from the status of niche interest to an increasingly strategic area of investigation. Drivers for such a development includes the need to develop coastal shelves to achieve net zero goals and geopolitical requirements for secure energy provision. The archaeological and heritage challenges of development of the coastal shelves revolve around the nature of the archaeology and a lack of adequate heritage protection in the deeper waters of the southern North Sea. 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, a series of research projects has sought to establish broader cooperative relationships to confront such issues, and this has involved industrial stakeholders, national curators, government bodies, and heritage professionals. Most recently the European Research Council has funded Subnordica, a research collaboration to devise new approaches for palaeolandscape exploration. This paper assesses the results of previous work in Doggerland and considers where future research may lead us.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Hunting for Hunters, Underwater: Results and Future Directions for Submerged Ancient Sites

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51072