Lecture abstracts

LECTURE: 'Not drowning but waving! Doggerland and the Lost Frontiers Project' 

by Prof. Vincent Gaffney

Prof Vincent GaffneyProfessor Vincent Gaffney is Anniversary Chair in Landscape Archaeology at the Department of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bradford. He has worked in digital Archaeology for more than two decades and, in Birmingham and Bradford, has been responsible for the development of visualisation services for university research and development. Current research projects include the ERC-funded Advanced Grant project - "Lost Frontiers: exploring climate change, settlement and colonisation of the submerged landscapes of the North Sea basin ". He is also part of the LBI_ArchPro “Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes” Project where he leads the UK team creating 3D and virtual imaging of the landscape from an extensive programme of geophysical survey of the largely unmapped landscape. More recently he was part of the "Curious Travellers" team which received AHRC funding to crowd-source images for reconstruction of damaged cultural sites.

 

The Bradford ERC Advanced Grant Project “Europe’s Lost Frontiers” was begun in December 2015 and seeks to:

• Generate topographical maps of early Holocene Doggerland that are as accurate and near complete as possible.

• Use traditional environmental proxies, but also sedaDNA recovered directly from buried sediments under the sea floor, as tools for the reconstruction of the palaeoenvironments of Doggerland, to explore the development of these landscapes during the period of climatic amelioration and specifically to look for environmental markers, within the marine environment which may not be recognised via traditional methodologies.

• To model the ecological development of Doggerland using through agent-based modelling.

The project, which includes, research groups based within universities across England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Belgium, Holland and China, has carried out mapping and new fieldwork across the North Sea and the Irish Sea, and this paper present some the latest results.