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Until around 8,000 years ago, Britain and the European mainland were connected by a land bridge that today is known as Doggerland. Although now submerged beneath the North Sea, this lost landscape has been recreated in an interactive simulation by archaeologists at the University of Bradford.
The digital model and accompanying animation – created by Philip Murgatroyd, Simon Fitch, Rachel Harding, and Vince Gaffney as part of the Unpath’d Waters project, exploring the UK’s maritime heritage collections – traces the gradual disappearance of the landmass. It begins around 20,000 years ago, when Doggerland stretched across the North Sea, and shows how its exposed extent fluctuated, then shrank over time: first to an archipelago, then to a single island, before being completely swallowed by water c.6000 BC, following an underwater landslide that saw the movement of an area roughly the size of Scotland, resulting in a tsunami.
The Bradford team used archaeological and environmental data to create the mapping, and to produce models of animal, plant, and human behaviours, which can all be seen within the simulation. These will be continually updated as research on Doggerland continues, resulting in an ever-changing and evolving program that can be used for research purposes, as well as by users who wish to learn about this past landscape.
You can view the animation at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogZ6lqCLir8. Two versions of the simulation have been created, one for use in public exhibitions (it was originally developed for the Unpath’d Waters travelling exhibition in 2024) while the other, which is more detailed, can be explored by users at home. Both versions of the simulation can be downloaded, free of charge, from https://zwack.itch.io/unpath-exhibition, and can be navigated using an Xbox-compatible game controller or the keyboard of a standard Windows desktop PC.
For more information on the Unpath’d Waters project, see https://historicengland.org.uk/research/current/discover-and-understand/coastal-and-marine/unpathd-waters.
Text: Rebecca Preedy / Image: Philip Murgatroyd
