The archaeology thread

Lets be clear, underwater archaeology of the old Doggerland could find some really interesting things—because modern development has affected the deep sea sediment less than the surrounding coastal surface (in general, I think we need to fund more underwater archaeology than we do). But that also doesn't mean that we can simply assume that anything we find down there is automatically associated with the most recent surface period—esp if the find was the result of mere dredging, rather than subsurface archaeology. A for where to do it, I think that the cold and the frequency of storms restrict make Atlantic underwater research very expensive. That said, scuba diving the Dogger Banks could be very rewarding.

But like Redmess, I wouldn't expect to find anything analogous to pre-dynastic Egypt, simply because domestication of plants and animals had not proceeded as far in Northwestern Europe as it had in the Eastern Mediterranean. Lower food production = lower population density = a different level of social/institutional complexity. That they built megaliths is amazing, but so did Mississippian culture before it disappeared, and no one has ever suggested that they made it to the pre-state level of social specialization.

I happened to use the introduction of copper because that was associated with the beginning of dynastic Egypt (and the building of the pyramids). Pottery occurred in both places thousands of years earlier (and yes, pottery firing is likely a distant pre-cursor of metal smelting). But pottery (or weaving for that matter) isn't associated with the Chiefdom to City State transition.

Right, and we aren't going to find any megaliths there, either, because those hadn't reached the Atlantic coast, let alone the Dogger bank, by the time it flooded.

Probably not, but that doesn't mean we wouldn't find some really interesting things.

Oh, sure, but it won't be much more interesting than what we'd find at other pre-neolithic sites. So no big grave monuments, let alone settlements.

So, you're saying that the finds at, say, Çatalhöyük are really quite dull and totally predictable?

Fie on that!

(I can never remember how to spell anything vaguely Turkic, let alone work put how to say those names — thank goodness for frantic googling!)

Edited by Euodiachloris on Jun 22nd 2020 at 1:16:52 PM

Ah, but we are talking about Turkey there, where the megalith culture had already arrived by then (perhaps even originating the European cultural spread of it). And these were no hunter gatherers, either, given that they had a settlement, and thus must have relied on farming.

Again, by the time this sort of thing reached the Atlantic, Doggerland was already long gone.

Edited by Redmess on Jun 22nd 2020 at 2:18:34 PM

They were in transition. Earlier than had previously been expected.

A lot earlier. A much more sophisticated, even with some quite clear connections with earlier cultures.

Heck, Çatalhöyük starts out pre-pottery, not just dabbling in this new fangled agrarian thing.

There's probably older stuff to be found in the region, as well. Although, good luck getting to it without framing it in Turkish nationalism at the moment.

Yeah, but I highly doubt you'll find something like that on Doggerland.

Look, I know the idea of some sunken prehistoric land is very romantic and conjures images of lost civilizations. There is a reason Atlantis is such a popular myth. But in the end, it was just an island that happened to have disappeared under the waves. People living there did not know about farming, and very likely did not build stone monuments to the dead (otherwise we'd expect more of them in the region around it, on what is now land). They were also nomadic, so did not build settlements. And since this was the end of the last ice age, it would have been a very sparsely populated landscape, unable to support settlements without farming.

Remember that Stonehenge was 3,000 years after Doggerland sank beneath the waves. The earliest megaliths in the British isles are from Ireland from around 3,700 BC. The closest we get on the continent is in Brittany, which is still a thousand years too late.

Unless you want to suggest that hunter gatherers in Portugal were sailing 8,000 miles north to build a monument on Doggerland, I don't think you are going to find anything of the sort there.

Perhaps you are thinking of this article, which refers to the find of some stone tools there, but the article seems to make quite a jump to make a settlement out of two pieces of flint.

Never said we'd find something exactly like that.

But, something on the way to becoming that? Betcha.

And, it needn't just be tiny village sized.

Mobile towns and cities aren't a novel concept in Eurasia and Africa. Nor are semi-permanent ritual sites.

If there's a strip of land easier to traverse than Doggerland when thaws took hold in Europe (or when freezes start again, the passage back to warmer climes when winter hits is just as clear), I'd like to meet it. The passage from North Africa wouldn't be that tough for even basic rafts, and I strongly suspect there was better than basic going on.

Older Erectus-cultures probably could often do way better than basic, given how far they got going southeast. Pottery not included. Fancy knots in sinew, rope, twine and string, though... Well, they'd have to. The basic roots of weaving, no?

In short: I try not to underestimate what the Paleolithic-Neolithic border could get up to, let alone other points of transition.

Having said that, what could be gained could also be lost. Or not found by somebody else. Or done weirdly.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Jun 22nd 2020 at 2:01:34 PM

Even if Erectus had somehow managed to reach Doggerland, the glaciers would have scraped any remains off the island in the 2 million years after they died out.

Didn't say that. <sighs> When I said "southeast", I meant Asia and Micronesia.

I very much doubt Erectus made it into the northwest... Well, except maybe as Heidelbergensis and/or us. For a given definition of Erectus.

I await the day we fess up to still being Erectus ourselves.

Sadly, probably no Çatalhöyük's in or around Britain in the neolithic, for the same reason as before—the estimated population density. There were supposed to have been as many as 10,000 people there. There's no way a permanent settlement of that kind could have existed back then. Which is not to say that they didn't periodically gather, even in the thousands—herdsmen are known to do that on occasion. But they wouldn't have left much in the way of large scale artifacts.

I would imagine that any northward demographic shift would have originated in France or Spain, since they are the closest geographically, and would more likely have happened overland rather than boat (much the way the Americas were populated, though somewhat smaller scale).

Erectus is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

Edited by DeMarquis on Jun 22nd 2020 at 9:50:04 AM

Yes, megalithic culture would have spread overland, westwards through the Mediterranean and up the Atlantic coast. I'm not sure why they would need to spread it overseas to begin with.

North Africa >> Iberia >> Doggerland. And visa versa.

Wouldn't surprise me if it could form a set migration route lasting several decades following fresh herds or new resources. And/or a trade route.

Amber is nice. Salmon, too. Different seals...

Some elephant groups do this kind of movement over generations (when people don't mess it up with roads, sudden suburbs, new farms and fences). It's not beyond us to try something similar.

Crossing the Med could be very easy or very hard, depending on the century. But, with water levels much lower most of the time: fairly easy at more points.

Heck, it would be hard to say where Africa stopped and Europe started, sometimes.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Jun 22nd 2020 at 3:04:39 PM

Are you proposing a 1500 mile migration route? Both ways? I know Americans think Europe is "small", but it is not that small.

Why, pray tell, would they bother?

Edited by Redmess on Jun 22nd 2020 at 4:13:26 PM

I grew up in Africa, so, yeah. I can think in terms of wildebeest and swallow.

When geography isn't the limiting issue for us, it's politics more than technology.

Smaller population over a wide area = fewer political barriers to effing amazing migrations. For a few thousand years, maybe. Then when you get more neighbours only tangentially related to you trying to use the same land at the same time... Well, things then get a little more dicey at that point.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Jun 22nd 2020 at 3:19:00 PM

Maybe so, but if that is the case, how would you explain the slow spread of megalithic culture over thousands of years? After all, if those hunter-gatherers travelled 1500 miles up the Atlantic coast every decade, it would hardly have taken a thousand years to spread their culture.

Also, why would they build something 1500 miles from home?

Um — home is around you all the time. Wherever your clan parks for three years, five years, a decade or maybe even two decades is where home is, because your clan/tribe is your home.

"Houses" can be packed. "Streets" can be moved. Some places are set up the same every time you go there, others not.

Tribes might move for many reasons, including following food/ fresh water. The primary one that's not food-related — splitting off from a previous grouping, usually in a huff over a major disagreement. Probably on where to go next. Or when to move on. Or if you're going to meet up again (and when/where).

Edited by Euodiachloris on Jun 22nd 2020 at 3:39:18 PM

Sure, but do they routinely travel 1500 miles?

How far is the Cape from the Congo basin? Because... Yeah. That's a messy migration I know about, for sure. Within historical memory, even.

Loops formed within it, too.

Alternatively, there's always the Mongols.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Jun 22nd 2020 at 3:52:55 PM

That's about 3000 miles by the looks of it. But is that a one way migration? Or do they go back and forth?

A bit of column A, column B, column "finding stiffer competition than expected and going sideways, looping in a figure of eight, bickering then following a cousin south" and some column "getting horribly lost".

Bare in mind that most of Southern Africa was just about recovering from the batch of illnesses the Portuguese and Arab traders had fairly recently brought by the time most "Bantu" showed up. Although earlier, they were hale, hearty and more than capable of poisoning invaders to their own traditional migration routes. (Quick-footed tribes making it south had a harder time of it: some disappeared.)

Not discussed: the plagues the migration suffered (and maybe those they inflicted on others), the horrible famines when the crops they brought with them didn't like the new soil/ ecosystem they popped them into, the cannibalism, the inter-tribe kerfuffles, the loss of cattle through various means, too many dogs, the gaining of chickens along the way (possible Chinese trade), the arguing over chickens...

Edited by Euodiachloris on Jun 22nd 2020 at 4:23:21 PM

I'm sorry Euo, but the Bantu expansion you refer to wasn't a single group of individuals traveling thousands of miles over a single generation. It was incremental in nature—a single band or clan might have traveled a hundred miles or less, settled down, with the next generation traveling on. The Bantu expansion was driven by a newly domesticated crops which allowed them to exploit a new habitat—displacing the hunter-gatherer tribes that were already living there. This is fairly well documented by archaeological evidence.

If you want to propose something similar for the expansion of the neolithic into Britain well and good, but it would be a similarly incremental process taking hundreds of not thousands of years (and I am not aware of any archaeological evidence to support that). By virtue of it's very nature, any demographic shift would settle the Iberian peninsula before it settled ancient Britain.

Neolithic people arrived in the vicinity of Britain around 6000 yrs ago. This was precisely the time period in which the Northern Sahara began to desertify, so some movement northward might make sense, if they had some way to cross the Straight of Gibralter, even though the time window is very short. However, the people of Northern Africa at that time were hunter-gatherers, not farmers nor herdsmen, so farming had to have had another origin. Most evidence I have seen points to a westward shift from Europe, and that most of those originated from Iberia.

At the time the earliest bits of Çatalhöyük were built, parts of Doggerland were still emergent. Incidentally, I don't think that there is a connection between the end of the Green Sahara and the arrival of Neolithic people to Britain; the closest relative to the latter were cultures of the Levant outside of the effect area of the Green Sahara.