Doggerland: Lost World under the North Sea

by Luc W.S.W. Amkreutz (Editor)

This popular-science book tells the story of one of the most important, but least known major archaeological sites in 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 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.

Table of Contents

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

Genres: Archaeology

210 pages, Hardcover

Published September 21, 2022

Reviews

[nettebuecherkiste · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sammlung von Artikeln, die einen guten Überblick zum Stand der Forschung zu Doggerland geben.

[Simon Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderfully written book written by a number of authors that tell their stories of the past present and future of this incredibly interesting place lost to the North Sea.

Included are short tales written by fossil collections from both England and the Netherlands who tell of their collecting and collections.
We learn who visited and left and whom lived in the river valley that connected Britain to Europe.

It’s a worthwhile and interesting read and I’d highly encourage anyone who has wondered about what lies beneath the East coast of Englands waves to pick it up.

[Marfita · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book of essays, free online! It's about the land that used to stretch from continental Europe to Britain ... until the ice melted. Oh, and that landslide in Norway. The North Sea is hugely important today as the land beneath was tens of thousands of years ago.
Reading this my poor little mind boggled at the information and thoughts of having to go through it again and work up a timeline danced like sugarplums in my head. But then I thought, there might be a timeline at the end!
And there is! Phew.
I'm envious of the Brits and Dutch and their beaches full of archaeological material. I'd love to find something, photograph and GPS locate it and post it to the Facebook page - and then tell all my friends that I found a baby mammoth molar - or something.
DNA has been found in these remains and tests can reveal what was being eaten. It boggles the mind. So much can be learned from so little. The difficulty is that most of the finds are no longer in situ. Must was dredged up and just scattered near the shore to replace natural erosion. They have been able to core in places, but most of the material turns up in nets or from dredging. Still, scientists are able to search through this spoil for artifacts and bones.
A worthwhile pursuit.
Purchase or read online here: https://www.sidestone.com/books/dogge...

[Rhiannon Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of short chapters collecting information and multiple perspectives on the ongoing work on Doggerland, ranging from the scientific to the informal. Approachable and interesting.

[Amy Weeks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting science with lots of pictures of the amazing finds!