Taken at the Flood: ensuring sustainable heritage strategies for green energy development in the North Sea

Offshore windfarms will expand significantly over the next decades as coastal nations adopt clean-energy infrastructures. Such initiatives are a welcome response to climate change, and the UK aims to quadruple offshore wind capacity and power all homes by 2030. The scale and rapidity of this development within the southern North Sea is unprecedented, and its impact on Europe's largest and best-preserved prehistoric landscape, Doggerland, will be substantial.

Within the last twenty years, globally innovative, UK research has begun to reveal the vast prehistoric landscape beneath the North Sea that was lost to sea level rise after the last glacial. Doggerland is the first, and only landscape of its kind, where research has achieved the position that archaeological investigation is now feasible. There remain, however, significant gaps in our knowledge. Whilst we know much about the physical landscape of Doggerland, its rivers, lakes and valleys, no evidence for settlement or in situ activity is known from the offshore zone of the North Sea, and our understanding of the communities who lived there is little better than that of the pioneers of our discipline over a century ago. Ultimately, the most significant staging ground for the last hunter-gatherers of Northwest Europe is, outside of disparate chance finds, unaccounted for.

Consequently, it is questionable whether adequate curatorial protocols exist nationally, or internationally, to fully mitigate the impact that development will have on this exceptional national resource. If immediate action is not taken, we risk damaging or destroying unique and unrecorded archaeological resources. Moreover, access to explore this incredibly rich and unique heritage will be significantly limited or lost following development. Academics, developers and curators must work together to devise mitigation strategies that assist green development and provide critical cultural information before the opportunity for exploration of Doggerland is lost.

Conventional means of archaeological prospection used in terrestrial or shallow-water surveys are not viable for deeper offshore waters. However, extensive, detailed mapping of Doggerland allows us to determine where accessible prehistoric land surfaces exist, where settlement or activity areas may be located, and where targeted archaeological prospection may be carried out with success. Recent research has identified two such areas. The first is the estuary of the submarine, Southern River, off the East Anglian Coast, the second is the Brown Bank, equidistant between the UK and Belgium. Both of these sites are associated with significant prehistoric finds and are accessible to investigation. Using high-resolution geophysics, autonomous vehicle survey, high-resolution vibracoring, grab sampling, and surface dredging, the project will recover archaeological, environmental and sedimentological data, and provide the first evidence for in-situ, deep-water archaeological settlement. This information, supported by the extensive landscape data derived from seismic mapping, will be used to generate models identifying areas of the North Sea that have greatest potential to provide settlement evidence. Within development zones, where future access will be limited, mitigation activities will be informed using data, developed during the project, indicating areas that are both accessible and likely to provide evidence of human activity.

In the short time available, the project will provide the opportunity for UK and European academics to work with national curators and developers through a network established by the project. This partnership will disseminate the experience gained from survey on the Brown Bank and Southern River and provide the evidence we require both to understand and protect the exceptional archaeological resource contained within the North Sea, and to support the UK's national green energy strategy.