Time Song by Julia Blackburn & Enrique Brinkmann

Author:Julia Blackburn & Enrique Brinkmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

c. 13,500 BP

By now what was left of the tea was cold and the muffins were reduced to a few crumbs. We moved back to Doggerland. For a long while there had been the theory of a land bridge, imagined as a wide causeway connecting Britain to Europe, with people and animals crossing over it – like the chicken – just in order to reach the other side. Bryony was increasingly persuaded that it was a large and inhabited country in its own right. In the early 1990s she was able to follow her hunch when she was awarded a research grant to make a two-year study of British wetland archaeology and its relationship with the submerged landscape of the North Sea.

She needed to find a name for the place she was looking for and she chose Doggerland because that put it alongside England and the Netherlands, Jutland, Friesland, Zeeland and all the other lands within the sea. She liked the etymology of dogger, which seems to derive from the Danish word dag, meaning dagger. The pliable stems of dogwood were used by Mesolithic peoples for making fish-traps, while the hard heart-wood was used for spears and indeed for a type of dagger. On top of that, dogwood used to grow on Dogger Bank.

She worked on a hypothetical map, using sonar evidence of steep- sided tunnel valleys as indicators for the flow of rivers in a time when those rivers were flowing. The modern distribution of certain varieties of freshwater fish helped to suggest where they might have met with the sea. The true extent of that land mass was given extra credibility from studies of a little primula flower which only grows in Yorkshire and must have migrated from Eastern Europe before Doggerland was lost, while the distribution of field voles with different evolutionary features on either side of Hadrian’s Wall indicated a connection with Western Europe. In this way the map began to take shape and the land it described grew bigger and bigger. There was and still is a lot of contention as to whether the couse of the Thames originally went northwards, and only changed direction when the chalk cliffs in the south were broken through eight thousand years ago, connecting the Channel with the North Sea, but that was not Bryony’s concern.

She spoke about the density of life that must have been concentrated in the northern coastal regions of Doggerland, an area where there was an all-year food supply very similar to what is found among the coastal hunting and fishing communities in British Columbia. These people were able to form a sedentary society, because the food they needed for their survival came to them, each in its own season, from the arrival of the spawning salmon, the migrating birds, the grazing animals.

I asked her where I should go to get close to an idea of what Doggerland was like. She said that although there are a few places in Britain, so

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