A great wave: the Storegga tsunami and the end of Doggerland?
2020
James Walker, Vincent Gaffney, Simon Fitch, Merle Muru, Andrew Fraser, Martin Bates and Richard Bates
Antiquity , Volume 94 , Issue 378 , December 2020 , pp. 1409 - 1425
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2020.49
Around 8150 BP, the Storegga tsunami struck North-west Europe. The size of this wave has led many to assume that it had a devastating impact upon contemporaneous Mesolithic communities, including the final inundation of Doggerland, the now submerged Mesolithic North Sea landscape. Here, the authors present the first evidence of the tsunami from the southern North Sea, and suggest that traditional notions of a catastrophically destructive event may need rethinking. In providing a more nuanced interpretation by incorporating the role of local topographic variation within the study of the Storegga event, we are better placed to understand the impact of such dramatic occurrences and their larger significance in settlement studies.
James Walker, Vincent Gaffney, Simon Fitch, Merle Muru, Andrew Fraser, Martin Bates and Richard Bates
Antiquity , Volume 94 , Issue 378 , December 2020 , pp. 1409 - 1425
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2020.49
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
Around 8150 BP, the Storegga tsunami struck North-west Europe. The size of this wave has led many to assume that it had a devastating impact upon contemporaneous Mesolithic communities, including the final inundation of Doggerland, the now submerged Mesolithic North Sea landscape. Here, the authors present the first evidence of the tsunami from the southern North Sea, and suggest that traditional notions of a catastrophically destructive event may need rethinking. In providing a more nuanced interpretation by incorporating the role of local topographic variation within the study of the Storegga event, we are better placed to understand the impact of such dramatic occurrences and their larger significance in settlement studies.
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There have been a number of papers on the Storegga Submarine Landslide off the coast of Norway, which occurred around 8150 yrs BP. This is a carefully considered short paper that looks at the evidence for Doggerland and concludes that while there was a substantial tsunami that might well have resulted in a dramatic loss of life and maybe a realignment of certain low-lying features in that part of the North Sea Basin which was then dry land, the tsunami did not "drown Doggerland." I have always thought that was a rather preposterous proposition, since tsunamis are short-lived catastrophic effects after which sea-level returns to its previous position. So this is quite a nuanced paper which records some sediments -- about 50 cm thick -- that might relate to the turbulent conditions associated with a big tsunami wave. The archaeological evidence for the effects of the tsunami is still very sparse.
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