They look in detail at the site of Thatcham in Berkshire, centred around a hut about 6m in diameter. (It is impossible now due to erosion to know whether this was solitary or part of the group.) "All the evidence suggested that the house had been maintained and rebuilt on several occasions by a family group, perhaps six or eight people, and that it served several generations of hunters... burnt bone fragments included wild pig, fox and, possibly, a domestic dog. Marine shellfish, particularly dog whelks, were also present on the site."
The seismic analysis that is at the core of this book creates a virtual environment in which it is possible to place people like this, and also creates an understanding of the way the sea would have gradually intruded on this always watery landscape:
"[The analysis] has provided information on c. 16,000km of river channels and no fewer than 24 lakes or marshes, with the largest of these covering more than 300 square kilometres... the heart of Doggerland was a massive water body, mapped for more than 1700 square kilometres, filling the Outer Silver Pit....It seems likely that Markham's Hole was also a large lake during the early Mesolithic... and may contain substantial palaeoenvironmental deposits that archaeologists might consider coring for further information...the features mapped are almost all areas where animal and plant resources that might be of value to hunter-gatherers are likely to be concentrated."
The possibilities here are mindblowing - and the authors are honest in what is known and what is not, stressing in their attempt at reconstructing the climate and vegetation of Doggerland how many unknown unknowns there might be.
That's also their approach to trying, tentatively, to understand how the people of Doggerland might have understood their landscape.
"The heartland of the Mesolithic in north-west Europe would have been constantly shrinking and this would have been obvious to the inhabitants. Sometimes slow then terrifyingly fast, the sea inevitably reclaimed ancestral hunting grounds, campsites and landmarks...[but]the emerging salt marshs may well have been regarded as a gift from the sea... the Mesolithic occupants of Doggerland and the adjacent regions would have regarded water in a unique manner, as a place where the ancestors dwelt and thus an area of special importance. At periods of low tide, these ancestral homelands could have been revisited and venerated."
But the authors don't stop there. They continue on to put Doggerland in a global context, identifying two other comparable sites: Beringia, in which is now the Bering Straits around Alaska and northern Siberia, and Sundaland, which is now the Sunda Shelf and the coastal strip around Malaysia, Indonesia and the South China Sea. But these, due to the lack of the detailed seismic data available for the North Sea, remain terra incognita.
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