Sunken landscapes and forgotten places
At the heart of any archaeological investigation lies the wish to enlighten our knowledge of the past and bring something back that has been ‘lost’. The thrill of discovery remains a strong motivation for many people. Antiquarians and early archaeologists frequently searched for long-forgotten places that were known only from legends, perhaps hoping for fame or riches. Modern-day archaeologists hope for more and clearer evidence of past human activities and societies, to provide more pieces in the big puzzle. Sites could have become uninhabitable or were abandoned and forgotten for various reasons and changes in climate, sea levels and coastlines have always influenced human activity. The first two books highlight that through systematic and detailed investigations these changes can be modelled and show how human occupation in these now lost landscapes can be researched: Doggerland and The drowning of a Cornish prehistoric landscape. The two following books look at ancient places that have been rediscovered and brought back to life: Lost cities of the ancient world and Mont'e Prama A lost Mediterranean culture.
For centuries, palaeontological and Mesolithic finds have been discovered along the coasts of England, the Netherlands and Denmark as well as in the North Sea. Due to more invasive exploration for oil and gas and the building of windfarms in recent decades increasingly more finds came to light. Many of the finds are very well preserved but, since it is extremely difficult to excavate under the sea, especially in deeper waters, research in this area was neglected and the main interpretation remained simply that these finds evidenced the land bridge between Britain and Europe during the last Ice Age. Bryony Coles published an influential survey in 1998 and to emphasise the importance of this area as a once inhabited region named it Doggerland, after the Dogger Bank. The name stuck and propelled the research into a new era; the past 20 years of intensified studies uncovered a detailed view of Doggerland, which now can be understood as one of the largest and most important archaeological sites worldwide. Doggerland was a vast fertile landscape in which Neanderthals and then modern humans hunted and lived. With rising sea levels, this landscape got less and less habitable and, around 8000 years ago, it was fully flooded and the North Sea was born.
In 2021, the first exhibition about the area took place in the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden: Doggerland: lost world under the North Sea outlined the research and displayed many of the finds. The curator, Luc Amkreutz, is one of the editors of this book which is an outcome of this exhibition. The volume gathers many scholars and their research on Doggerland as well as thoughts on the present state of the North Sea and highlights the people who walk its shores in search for remnants of Doggerland. The book is clearly written and easily accessible. It is described as a popular science book yet it is well worth the read for any interested scholar as it is informative and well-illustrated. The volume is divided into five parts: 1. Doggerland, on the rediscovery; 2. Doggerland early inhabitants, namely Neanderthals and early modern humans; 3. Drowning Doggerland, on the activities of hunter-gatherers and prehistoric people in the receding landscape; 4. Doggerland investigated, on the scientific research of the finds; 5. Doggerland today, how to collect, research and protect this landscape now and in the future.
In Part 1 the geological and palaeoenvironmental background is explained and visualised in many maps that show the dry landmass during the Ice Ages and then the disappearance of Doggerland under the sea between 14 000 to 8000 years ago. Part 2 begins with a highlight: the first known evidence of human activities in Northern Europe c. 900 000 years ago at the site of Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast, Britain. It is an incredible find of footprints of a small group of early humans, probably Homo Antecessor, who had walked along the estuary. These appeared on the seabed and were hastily documented at low tides, before the sea washed them away for good. Further excavations in the area revealed tools and bones that allowed closer dating. Another important find is a Neanderthal skull fragment from Zeeland, which leads to a discussion on Neanderthal occupation and finds. During colder periods, hominids left Doggerland to move south and only at warmer times returned to repopulate it. This continued until modern humans rediscovered this land at the end of the Ice Age. The first piece of art is a bone with decorated v-lines and dates to just under 14 000 years ago and belongs to hunter-gatherers of the Federmesser culture (Armkreutz et al. Reference Armkreutz2018). Part 3 looks at the changes after the Ice Age, when the landscape slowly disappeared into a seascape. Vegetation and animals changed from a steppe with reindeers and mammoths to forests with aurochs, deer, elk wild boars, otters and beavers. The climate got wetter and hunter-gatherers adapted to this rich wetland environment as shown by large numbers of barbed spearheads and arrowheads, made of bone and dating to 9000 to 6000 BC. But even underwater this seascape was not abandoned and served from later prehistoric times—until now—as a transport vein. Part 4 highlights scientific research, for example, on bone material such as DNA and isotopes to reveal more on the health and diet; further results are expected in the near future.
Part 5 connects in a wonderful way people from the past and modern humans who are collecting the finds that the North Sea gives back little by little. Twelve of these collectors, from all walks of life, are briefly introduced and asked about their motivation and their finds. One example is a ‘bone diver’, a photo shows him with a mammoth bone as tall as his young son. On the final pages, the editors reminisce about the impact that the rediscovery of Doggerland had and an Afterword highlights that there is still much to discover!
In short, this is an enjoyable and engaging book that I can highly recommend. It enlightens readers about the research on Doggerland from many angles and connects us with this distant past.
The earliest known written record of Britain is the account of the Greek explorer Pytheas who is believed to have travelled from his home in Massalia (modern Marseilles, France) and circumnavigated Britain and Ireland around 320 BC. In one of the most evocative surviving passages, Pytheas describes an island called Ictis where tin was traded between the local people and merchants. The exact location of Ictis is lost, yet one of the leading candidates is St Michael's Mount off the coast from Penzance, Cornwall, which dominates the surrounding Mount's Bay. It is the archaeological and environmental investigation of this broader landscape of Mount's Bay that is the focus for the monograph.
At its core are two recent projects undertaken by the Cornwall Archaeological Unit—the excavation of a Bronze Age barrow in advance of the building of Penzance Heliport (Section 2) and the environmental auger sampling and analysis of nearby Marazion marsh (Section 3). These results are followed by an extensive and wide-ranging synthesis of the environmental and archaeological evidence across this western-most region of England by the two editors, Andy Jones and Mike Allen (Section 4). Their interpretation provides vivid and insightful perspectives into a changing coastal landscape and the people who lived in and responded to it.
The excavation of what appeared to be a small and unpromising barrow revealed not only evidence of the expected Early Bronze Age funerary monument but, surprisingly, two Late Bronze Age cists, one of which contained a copper ingot wrapped in what was probably organic material. Unfortunately, the soils of Cornwall are typically not favourable towards the preservation of human remains and this site was no exception. Next to the barrow more than a dozen evaluation trenches and core borings were also dug to gain a full palaeoenvironmental record of the site. A wide-ranging programme of coring, geoarchaeological and palaeoenvironmental work was also undertaken at Marazion marsh. It revealed a rich and invaluable sequence of marshy areas with tall fringing and shallow water vegetation that initially dried out each summer before being submerged permanently by rising water levels. The data of these two sites are combined with previous palaeoenvironmental research of this area to deliver, for the first time, a complete overview of the drowned landscape and to allow modelling of the sea level increase in detail.
In the final chapters, the editors describe and explore how the encroaching seas from c. 10 750 cal BC onwards that led to the creation of Mount's Bay would have impacted upon the hunting and later farming communities. Changes might even have been felt at a generational level with the loss of hunting grounds and grazing areas for livestock. The increasing salinisation of the groundwater would have rendered it undrinkable as well as unliveable for the freshwater ecosystem of fish, insects and plants. The still-visible remains of the past landscape, such as the forest of tree stumps beneath the sea, would have provided not only reminders of a lost world but also the foundations for myths and stories about those who inhabited it. There is a stimulating discussion about whether the location of the barrow, the many depositions of Late Bronze Age bronze metalwork and subsequently Roman coins in or near the water, should be understood as a response to the relentless advance of the sea. These stories are still being told as detailed in the new artwork and poetry at the end of the book.
This well-put-together volume delivers a thoroughly researched environmental background for an ever-changing landscape of rising sea levels and loss of land, combined with the human responses to these changes, which lays an important base for future studies in this area. Yet, it is also these changing sea levels from around the Late Bronze Age that created the tidal island—initially navigable by boat only on the eastern side—that we now know as St Michael's Mount and may well have been known to Pytheas and the tin-trading merchants from overseas as Ictis.
Philip Matyszak's collection about 37 ancient cities delivers useful short portraits, is beautifully illustrated and designed for a wide audience, which makes it a perfect book to dip into for a quick reference or to browse through and compare the different times and places of ‘urban’ dwelling. The definition of a city is kept quite loose and mainly depends on a settlement's relative size to those surrounding it; therefore, places like Skara Brae are counted here as a ‘city’. The book's purpose is not to discuss the development of urbanism but it highlights places at different times and gives ideas for the various ways for how urban life existed in the past. The term ‘lost’ is also kept loose and encompasses places that at some point were forgotten and ‘dropped off the map’. Some have been found in the recent past, some were abandoned, and memories of their identity were lost, some are known only in tales but have not yet been located and some are literally lost, drowned by the sea, or covered by sand or vegetation.
The book is divided in four parts, each part has a brief introduction that addresses a broader readership but always delivers food for thought and helps to place the ‘cities’ in their time. The first part is about the oldest cities, such as Çatalhöyük, Skara Brae and Hattusa. These are followed by cities up to Roman times ‘From Troy to Rome’, including Mycenae and Persepolis. The third part ‘Across the Roman Empire’ highlights places like Glanum, Cyrene and Maiden Castle. The last part visits places on ‘The empire's edge and beyond’, examples being Palmyra, Waldgirmes and Dura-Europos.
All the urban portraits have a location map, date range, name of the city, a ‘title’ and a quote. A few pages of descriptions, facts and ‘voices’ of ancient writers, myths and anecdotes are underpinned with many images of the buildings, famous finds and sometimes aerial views. The short chapters end with a paragraph on when the site was rediscovered and excavated as well as what is there to see today inviting the reader to visit.
Matyszak skilfully weaves engaging stories and connects scholarly research with various tales and legends, which were often the reason why someone went to look for these places, as in the case of Troy. The different organisation of each community—visible in their communal and private areas, temples, palaces and their relation to the dead—tells us about past societies. In one of the oldest cities, Çatalhöyük, the dead were buried under the floor of the house, and mothers with neonatal children were placed close to the hearth. In later times, the dead were mostly buried outside the settlements, sometimes in great temples. And in other cases, such as Antinopolis, a city was founded on the spot where Emperor Hadrian's loved companion died. Through inscriptions and other textual sources, we know about the function of different buildings and areas, especially of Greek and Roman sites. The different places show how humans lived together in diverse ways and allow glimpses of changing societies, sometimes egalitarian but mostly hierarchical, amidst challenges with changing climates and political fortunes. Some places have a surprisingly long time span of occupation before they were lost or were forgotten. The book is an enjoyable read and will be picked up again and again to visit the stories of these ancient cities and the people who lived in them.
Mont'e Prama is a funerary and sacral site on the Sinis peninsula in central western Sardinia, dating to end of the Nuragic period (Final Bronze/Early Iron Age c. 1150–700 BC). It is famous for its anthropomorphic stone statues, ‘the giants’, which are up to 2m tall. This volume was conceived in connection with an exhibition to make this extraordinary site known to a wider audience and is one of the first publications about the site in English. The Introduction by the editors is a short overview of the book. The five chapters are essays focusing on different aspects of the site: interpretations, excavations, its place in the Iron Age societies, its place in the living landscape, and the restoration and display of the statues. Following the chapters is an appendix, an illuminating and important account by Giuditta Giardini, a lawyer, detailing the illicit trafficking of Sardinian antiquities and highlighting that action is needed urgently.
Placing the chapter ‘Rites of initiation, war, and death in Mont'e Prama’ at the beginning is rather odd. The reader is thrown into the middle of interpretative ideas without describing the finds or site first. The descriptions of the different statue types is ambiguous and clearly some things got lost in translation. Raimondo Zucca presents the different groups of giants: 18 ‘boxers’, unarmed but wearing caestus (fighting gloves) and maybe a dagger (though it is not explained why a dagger is not considered a weapon) and a soft curved shield; 11 ‘archers’ with bows; and nine ‘warriors’ with swords; a smaller group similar to the boxers as they are equipped with caestus and a rolled shield but wearing sandals and a conical headdress. These are referred to as ‘military priests’. Zucca's interpretation sees them all as actors in a bloody initiation rite, like those in the later Spartan warrior society in Archaic Greece, and as a reflection of the society of the buried people in Mont'e Prama. The statues are clearly designed after the famous Sardinian bronzetti, small bronze statues, but the monumental size is possibly influenced by contacts with the Near East.
Emerenziana Usai, one of the excavators of the site, delivers a clear and concise rundown of the excavations with results and publications from the discovery of the site in 1974 until 2022. Usai's interpretations of the finds are more cautious and differentiated and remind us that there is much more that will come to light in future excavations and studies.
The late Guide Clemente contributed an excellent essay placing Mont'e Prama within the contemporary Sardinian society. Clemente looks back to the Nuragic people (c. 1600–900 BC), who built an estimated 6000–7000 nuraghes on Sardinia, from one small tower to much larger complexes. It is assumed that these sites reflect a high population number. These communities had many contacts across the Mediterranean especially with Greece, Cyprus and the Near East. During the final centuries of this Nuragic culture, in the ninth to seventh centuries BC, some nuraghes were abandoned, some were destroyed or collapsed, many were still used but for a different function— that is, as sacred places, and around them villages were built. Mont'e Prama started as a burial ground in late Nuragic times (c. 1000 BC) and was later as well reused/rebuilt as a sacred place and burial ground with ancestral connections, possibly like the Greek temples for heroic ancestors: ‘heroon’. The giant statues were placed there in late eighth/early seventh century BC.
Peter van Dommelen and Alfonso Stiglitz convincingly argue that despite the uniqueness of the site—with its enormous statues and rare burials with no grave goods—it is interlocked with the landscape and with the people who inhabited it and who reused, reinvented and maintained this site. Both authors have researched the nuraghe S'Urachi, which is the largest and possibly most important settlement close to Mont'e Prama. Though no direct link can yet be established, it is likely that some of the people who worshipped and were buried here lived in S'Urachi.
In the last chapter, Roberto Nardi, the head of the conservation, describes the successful synergy of local authorities and archaeological agencies that made it possible for the finds from the earlier excavations to be brought together, cleaned, restored and refitted where possible before being exhibited in the Giovanni Marongiu civic museum in Cabras. The scale of the undertaking of restoration and re-fitting is immense. The many new finds from 2014 onwards are yet to be incorporated with the old finds and await their inclusion into this detailed process.
The book offers a lot of information and is beautifully illustrated, but it would have benefitted from a concise overview of the site itself with a phased site map and summary of the main findings. Instead, the reader must puzzle the details together through the chapters. The website for the online exhibition is very helpful: www.monteprama.it. The volume succeeds in displaying Mont'e Prama and its giants as a unique and fascinating site embedded and rooted in the societies of the Nuragic Bronze and Iron Ages on Sardinia. It also clearly demonstrates the urgent need to restore the recent finds and for more research to gain a deeper understanding of the site and the people who built and frequented it.
This list includes all books received between 1 July 2023 and 31 August 2023. Those featuring at the beginning of New Book Chronicle, however, have not been duplicated in this list. The listing of a book in this chronicle does not preclude its subsequent review in Antiquity.
