Overview

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.

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9789464261134

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"""Within the book there are contributions from some 30 authors, and the editors are to be congratulated on bringing them together to produce the resulting coherent narrative... ...Overall, this provides the reader with a well-informed picture of the process of investigation, as well as an outline of the wide-ranging results... ...Both editors and contributors are to be congratulated on the resulting multifaceted narrative of how and where and why this land under the North Sea should become better known.""-- ""Current Archaeology"""

Author Information

Luc Amkreutz (1978) studied Prehistory at the University of Leiden. In 2004 he gained his MA with a study of the earliest farmers in the Netherlands (Linearbandkeramik) and their settlements along the river Meuse. In 2013 he was awarded his doctorate for his thesis Persistent Traditions: A long-term perspective on communities in the process of Neolithisation in the Lower Rhine Area (6000–2500 cal. BC), within the Malta Harvest project ‘From Hardinxveld to Noordhoorn – from Forager to Farmer’. He focused particularly on the socio-cultural changes in small-scale communities during the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture. Since 2008 Amkreutz has been the curator of Prehistory at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities (RMO). Apart from numerous exhibitions, he worked on the 2011 new permanent exhibition Archaeology of the Netherlands, offering a fresh perspective on 300,000 years of the country’s history. Amkreutz is also a member of the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University. He has conducted wide-ranging research including field projects into Early Neolithic farmers and the investigations of burial mounds. Currently, he is involved in researching the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Prehistory of Doggerland. In 2016 he was awarded an NWO Museumgrant to investigate the ‘Ancient Europe’ collection of the museum. Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof is a freelance consultant, researcher and editor known as the Overdressed Archeologist & Editor. In addition to publishing half a dozen books with us, she frequently collaborates with Sidestone Press doing both copy editing, book design and our social media marketing. Sasja 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 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. From 2012 to 2017 she was a PhD researcher at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University (the Netherlands). She was awarded an 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 completed her PhD in December 2017, and in June 2018 she was awarded the Joseph Déchelette European Archaeology Prize for her two-volume dissertation Fragmenting the Chieftain published in the Museum of Antiquities’ PALMA series. The same publication would later place second for the W.A. van Es Prize for Dutch Archaeology (2018).

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