After a successful expedition in 2018, the second voyage in search of prehistoric landscapes and submerged settlements within the Brown Bank area of the southern North Sea will set off on May 7 for an 11-day period. Scientists from Belgium and the Europe’s Lost Frontiers team will combine acoustic techniques and physical sampling of the seabed to unravel the topography and history of these landscapes and their inhabitants.

The May 2019 expedition led by Dr. Tine Missiaen from the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) with scientists from Belgium (Ghent University, VLIZ) and the UK (Europe’s Lost Frontiers – team members DrSimon Fitch and Andy Fraser). The voyage on board the Belgian research vessel “RV Belgica” takes place within a larger collaborative Belgian-UK-Dutch research project “Deep History: Revealing the palaeo-landscape of the southern North Sea” which is aimed at reconstructing the Quaternary history (roughly spanning the last 500.000 years) and human occupation of the wider Brown Bank area.

The project complements the Bradford-led “Europe’s Lost Frontiers” project, in which archaeologists are mapping the prehistoric North Sea landscape known as Doggerland, funded by the European Research Council (ERC).

Until sea levels rose at the end of the last Ice Age, between 8-10,000 years ago, an area of land connected Great Britain to Scandinavia and the continent. The Lost Frontiers team has identified thousands of kilometres of plains, hills, marshlands and river valleys – but despite this, evidence of human activity has remained elusive.

Archaeologists have long suspected that the southern North Sea plain – right in the heart of Doggerland – may have been home to thousands of people. Chance finds by trawling fishermen over many decades support this theory. A concentration of archaeological material, including worked bone, stone and human remains, has been found within the area around the Brown Bank, an elongated, 30-kilometre long sand ridge roughly 100 km due east from Great Yarmouth and 80 km west of the Dutch coast. The quantities of material suggest the presence of a prehistoric settlement.

In 2018 teams from the Flanders Marine Institute, University of Bradford, Ghent University and the Dutch Geological Service joined forces to carry out detailed geophysical and geotechnical surveys of the area to identify prehistoric land surfaces, including river valleys and former lakes, and to extract shallow sediment cores to look for evidence of past activity. Thanks to the simultaneous use of different seismic sources an uninterrupted image of the subbottom was obtained with unprecedented detail. Combined with the study of sediment cores this allowed to refine the search to areas on the Brown Banks where the team believe they reach a preserved land surface more than 8000 years old.

The May 2019 expedition will focus on detailed investigations in these areas, deploying VLIZ’s novel multitransducer echosounder, which uses sonar technology to obtain images of the sub bottom with the highest possible resolution, and the collection of larger samples of sediment as well as video footage from the seafloor using VLIZ’s dedicated videoframe. The team will also be visiting another area, known as the “Southern River”, a major prehistoric river valley flowing across a submerged headland off the East Anglian coast. Previously surveyed by Europe’s Lost Frontiers, the team believes that the estuary of the river, which may also have been flanked by white chalk cliffs, provides another prime area for prehistoric settlement. The detailed survey of this area during this expedition will be the first to assess its archaeological potential.

Follow us on @BrownBank2018 or #BrownBank2019

The full press release is available at https://lostfrontiers.teamapp.com/newsletters/630229
and
http://www.vliz.be/nl/persbericht/bruine-banken-witte-kliffen-zoektocht-naar-prehistorische-menselijke-aanwezigheid-Noordzee
and
https://www.bradford.ac.uk/news/archive/2019/brown-banks-and-white-cliffs.php

Location

North Sea