Archipelagos and islands

The North Sea is not renowned for its islands, and much of the modern land–sea interface is sharp, especially along the coasts of Jutland, North and South Holland and much of England. Nevertheless, the North Sea does contain a surprisingly large number of islands and archipelagos, which can be presented with reference to a clear north–south divide. In the northern half of the North Sea, most islands are of hard rock with shallow soils, and their islandness is the result of ongoing glacio-isostatic uplift of previously drowned lands and sea-level rise. With the exception of the Shetland and Orkney archipelagos, few of these islands are found at a great distance from the mainland, and the majority of the countless islands, islets, and rock outcrops off the North Sea coasts of Norway, Sweden, Scotland, and north-east England can be found within a few miles of the mainland. In the southern half of the North Sea, the islands are mainly made up of sand and clay and, in their history if not today, were frequently sandbanks formed by the sea utilizing both marine and riverine sediments. Most of the islands of the Wadden Sea in Denmark, Germany, and Holland are sandbanks elevated by aeolian-formed sand dunes. Further south, the core of the large islands of Zeeland is principally formed of riverine sands and marine clays intercalated with peat, reflecting coastal wetland conditions at various times in the Post-glacial and Holocene (Vos and Van Heeringen 1997). As with Zeeland, the islands on the English side of the North Sea, such as Mersey Island in the Blackwater estuary and Foulness Island in Essex, have now been incorporated into the mainland. Only a few islands cannot be so simply classified:Helgoland in the German Bight, a Sherwood Sandstone stack of Triassic date, is the best known example. Island archaeology, as we have seen (chapter 2), has for many decades approached islands as environments that were relatively isolated from the wider world.

Introduction: the sea is ‘good to think’

The locale of nearly all archaeological research is land. Whether one studies landscapes, excavates sites such as monuments, cemeteries or settlements, or analyses material culture, the basis for study and debate comes nearly always from terrestrial contexts. Most land-locked archaeologists simply disregard the seas and the oceans, and where land is bordered by a saltwater landscape, this is all too often eagerly adopted as the convenient boundary of the study areas. Others, studying exotic material culture, are more interested in the terrestrial find spots than the maritime journeys of objects that have travelled long distances. Some archaeologists have studied the exploitation of the sea from the land, but rarely stray beyond the functional utilization of the sea and coast for food. A small number of archaeologists work on ships and waterside structures directly related to shipping activities, but this group of maritime archaeologists, with their own conferences and journals, have had very little impact on the thinking of their land-locked colleagues. The principal reason for choosing a sea over a landmass as the geographical centre for this archaeological study is that it provides an alternative space in which to explore the ways that people related with, and connected to, the world around them. As a part of the world that is physically unmodified and unalterable by humanity (at least until very recently), the sea offers an alluring contrast to the terrestrial landscape, with its imprint of human existence visible everywhere. This inability to change and to control the sea has, and had, profound impacts on how people engage with it. Gilles Deleuze developed this concept furthest, most notably in his study of Desert islands (1953), in which the sea is very much seen as a different space, the ‘realm of the unbound, unconstricted, and free’. The sea has since come to be seen as ‘the Deleuzian Ocean’ (Connery 2006: 497). One could say that this study offers a ‘maritime turn’ in terrestrial-dominated archaeology and, by doing so, sets out to investigate aspects of human behaviour that have been, to varying extents, disregarded, overlooked or ignored.

Moving across the North Sea

Movements between different lands around the North Sea have always been taking place. While the North Sea was evolving gradually, over the millennia, following the melting of the Devensian ice sheet, close contacts across what remained of the North Sea Plain never ceased, as evidenced by near-parallel developments of the Maglemosian-type tools in southern Scandinavia and Britain (Clark 1936), and by particular practices such as the deliberate deposition of barbed points (see chapter 3). Connections across the North Sea throughout the Mesolithic and the beginning of the Neolithic would have been made easier because of the number of islands surviving within the rising sea. The polished axes from Dogger Bank and Brown Bank either represent human presence on these islands in the early Neolithic or else indicate that the existence of these islands sometime in the pre-Neolithic past was embedded in the social memory of later periods. Both possibilities emphasize the fact that the North Sea was a knowable and visited place. Movements across the North Sea took various forms: as exchange between elites from different regions of exotic or ‘prestige’ goods, and possibly of marriage partners; as trade in both luxury and bulk commodities; and in the transfer of people, in some cases as individuals such as pilgrims and missionaries, and in other cases as groups of pirates or as part of larger-scale migrations. Over time, connectedness across the North Sea changed both in nature and in intensity; this was due in no small part to changes in the nature of the craft available. An outline of the movement of goods from the Neolithic through to the end of the Middle Ages illustrates this. Contacts across the North Sea for the Neolithic and the Bronze Age are demonstrated in the long-distance exchange of exotic objects and artefacts, including Beaker pottery, jewellery, or other adornments of gold, amber, faience, jet, and tin; also copper and bronze weapons and tools, and flint daggers, arrowheads, and wrist guards (e.g. Butler, 1963; O’Connor, 1980; Bradley 1984; Clarke, Cowie, and Foxon 1985).

The cultural biographies of boats

Up to this point, boats and ships have been treated largely as functional objects. The characteristics of these objects enabled people to engage with the sea in many different ways (see chapter 7), while for those who travelled on these craft particular socio-political processes have been observed (see chapter 8). However, the contextualized study of boats suggests that alongside functional properties, craft also had attributed meanings, as implied for example by the deliberate deposition of the Hjortspring boat in a bog on the island of Als, or by the use of boats in burials at Sutton Hoo, Gokstad, Oseberg and at many other locations around the North Sea. The symbolic significance of ships and boats was the focal point of the 1994 conference ‘The Ship as Symbol in Scandinavian Prehistory and Middle Ages’, which is recognized as a significant departure from existing debates in maritime archaeology. The ideas in this chapter are to an extent developed from the papers in the published proceedings (Crumlin-Pedersen and Thye 1995). The 1994 conference brought together a range of researchers who considered the other-than-functional and other-than-technical aspects of Scandinavian maritime archaeology. Symbols are understood to be semantically opaque representations producing semiotic systems in society (cf. Kobyliński 1995: 10–1). The use of the ship as a symbol is unsurprising. Much of the early maritime archaeology of Scandinavia is known to us not from wrecks that sank to the sea bed during storms, but from boat burials, and other deliberate depositions of boats in non-maritime contexts such as bogs, as well as from the carved and etched boat images on rocks and bronzes. The contexts of the boats imply that these carried meanings beyond their operational use, functioning therefore as signs and acting as symbols. The role of boats in the Sagas has advanced the notion that ships in the Viking period were more than simply craft to cross the sea with. Kobyliński (ibid. 15) makes the point that the extensive use of boats and ships as symbols in Scandinavia is linked to beliefs that the world of the dead is across the water, be that hell across the Gjoll River or Valhalla across the Thund River.

The daily practice of seafaring: the ship as heterotopia par excellence

The previous chapters explored how communities living around the North Sea were connected, and the roles played by the different types of craft in establishing these connections. This has provided the starting point for developing an understanding of the practice of seafaring. A considerable body of literature exists on the non-functional aspects of seafaring, especially the many practices and rituals that surround the act of putting out to sea. From a historic perspective, Kirby and Hinkkanen (2000: 184–5) recall the numerous rituals that attended the departure of fishing fleets, and how in recent centuries, especially in Catholic regions such as Flanders, such rituals were often sanctioned by, and sometimes integrated within, the practice of the official church. For example, most four-legged animals, especially pigs but not cats, could bring bad luck once on board, and even the names of such animals were taboo. Christer Westerdahl has written extensively on aspects of taboos and noa, and the importance of ritualized practices and the role of liminal agents that are meant to ensure successful completion of journeys and fishing expeditions (2005). The survival of these practices in folklore, and in the practice and memories of older fishermen reminds us that the premodern–modern dichotomy so often invoked when interpreting terrestrial archaeology is not always applicable when investigating the sea. The arguments advanced in this chapter take a somewhat different approach. However, they have developed from the same understanding that to go to sea is a potentially life-threatening activity, unlike most undertakings on land, and something too that is surrounded by peculiar practices and beliefs that transgress the premodern–modern boundary. They aim to place the daily practice of seafaring at the centre of our understanding of socio-political developments through the use of Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia (introduced in chapter 2). This chapter takes its title from Foucault’s presentation in which he argued that the ‘ship is the heterotopia par excellence’ (1966), and proposes that whereas the terrestrial sphere has often represented the world of the establishment, the sea has functioned at various points in the past as the space where the conventional is contested and inverted.

Socializing coastal landscapes

For many decades, archaeologists have studied the ways in which past people have made the landscapes they inhabited their own, through the construction of paths and roads, monuments, settlements, and field systems, leading to what has been termed ‘cultural landscapes’. Such approaches have great validity on land. Archaeologists’ interest in constructed monuments, for example, enables the analysis of social structures and social changes over centuries, and nowhere is this approach more vigorously pursued than for the monument-rich Wessex region in the Neolithic and Bronze Age (e.g. Renfrew 1973; Barrett 1997). In order to achieve such a social analysis of monuments, understanding the sequences of construction, alteration, modification, and sometimes conversion is a long-standing theme in archaeological landscape research (e.g. Bradley 1998). The notion that ‘one type of monument could only be read and understood in relation to the others’ (Tilley 1994: 203) is broadly accepted. Most archaeologists have taken it for granted that man-made features and monuments survive for centuries, and much human activity in the landscape, including the construction of new monuments, is believed to have been guided by the presence of these monuments of the ancestors. A century is a short time in the lifespan of a monument. On the coast, however, few constructed monuments survive for so long. A recent example may help to illustrate the short-lived nature of monuments in coastal settings. On the North Sea coast of Jutland, between the villages of Lønstrop and Nørre Rubjerg, stands the Rubjerg Kunde lighthouse. Inaugurated in 1900, this 23 m-high lighthouse was taken out of commission in 1968, but the outbuildings were converted into a cafeteria and a museum. These were abandoned in 2002 as the sand dunes covered the outhouses, leaving only the upper part of the lighthouse prey to the dunes. Some of the nearby dunes stand higher than the top of the lighthouse. The site now attracts unprecedented numbers of visitors, who come to see the interplay between human creation and natural forces at work. On the coast, the landscape is changing constantly.

Fish: exploring the sea as a taskscape

Food and social identities are closely connected. The idea that ‘to be Mesolithic is to be a fisher’, with all the connotations that differentiate the Mesolithic fisher from the Neolithic farmer, characterizes some of the debates that are ongoing (e.g. Thomas 2003). Food and social identities are connected, especially in the case of societies of fishermen, for example in the wearing of distinctive national dress by the female relatives of fishermen in the Netherlands in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries (see chapter 2). However, we should not forget that fishing as a full-time occupation appears in the North Sea only around the 15th century AD, and that before that date fishing was only ever a part of people’s occupation and social identity (Kirby and Hinkkanen 2000; Fox 2001). Nevertheless, to be a successful fisher required skill, tools and knowledge of the tides and the movement of fish. All these created distinctive taskscapes where people’s daily engagement with the sea followed the rhythm of the tides, rather than that of the sun. This chapter considers the North Sea as a taskscape, focusing on the long history of fishing and fish consumption, and the current debates on the importance of fishing in our prehistoric and historic past. It presents a short overview of the role of fishing in the North Sea from the Mesolithic through to the 15th century AD, and the tools and craft used for this. Using anthropology and oral history research, the distinctive identities formed by fishing communities will be considered, and the chapter will ask whether this distinctiveness has a long heritage, or is of more recent date. The earliest indirect evidence for the use of marine resources in the North Sea basin goes, possibly, back to the tenth millennium cal BC. The zoo-archaeological evidence from the Galta peninsula in present-day south-west Norway, where flint points of the Ahrensburg complex have been discovered in redeposited beach sediments, has already been introduced (chapter 3; Prøsch-Danielsen and Høgestøl 1995). This evidence has been invoked to argue that south-west Norway was suited to reindeer hunting at the end of the Younger Dryas stadial, or very early Holocene.

An archaeological theory of the sea

Despite the wealth of information available on the North Sea, surprisingly few archaeologists have set out to study how people related to and connected to this sea, and other seas, in the past. In fact, we can distinguish four established traditions in archaeological research of the sea, all of which originated in the 20th century. First, many (or most) land-locked archaeologists working on any side of the North Sea have simply disregarded the sea itself, seeing it merely as the natural boundary of their study areas rather than considering its role in any significant way. At best, they are seeing the sea from the land, without genuinely engaging with it (cf. Cooney 2003: 323), although the panorama is slowly changing (e.g. cf. Bradley 1984 with Bradley 2007). Second, there are those archaeologists with an interest in long-distance exchange and exotic objects, who focused initially on the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods but have also been concerned, in more recent decades, with the early medieval period. Although these archaeologists have recognized the seas as conduits of long-distance exchange, they have rarely questioned how the practice of travel across the sea impacted on the social products of such exchange (e.g. Butler 1963, O’Connor 1980, Bradley 1984, Clarke, Cowie, and Foxon 1985, for the Neolithic and early Bronze Age; Hodges 1982, Loveluck and Tys 2006, for the early medieval period). Third, a group of archaeologists have studied the exploitation of the sea, especially for fish and salt, and the occupation and the reclamation of the edges of the sea in the Roman period and afterwards; but these studies have generally not strayed beyond the functional utilization of the sea and coast both for food and for land for food production (e.g. Clark 1961; Van den Broeke 1985; Andersen 1995, 2007; Rippon 2000; Smart 2003; Milner et al. 2004; De Kraker and Borger 2007). And fourth, maritime archaeologists’ focus has been on ships and waterside structures directly relating to shipping activities, but the development of a fuller appreciation of the significance of the sea and seafaring to past societies remains something of a distant aspiration (e.g. Ellmers 1972; McGrail 2003: 1).

Conclusions: a maritime biography

The purpose of writing this book was to explore aspects of human behaviour that have been, to varying extents, disregarded, overlooked, or ignored in terrestrial-dominated archaeology to date. Recognizing that the sea ‘is good to think’, it was envisaged that an exploration of North Sea archaeologies could launch something of a ‘maritime turn’. This final chapter considers the broad themes of the human past that have been enlightened through this study, and questions if and how these can be reproduced in land-based research. Five interrelated themes are presented here: the essence of nature–society interrelationships, the attribution of forms of agency to inanimate objects, deviant spaces, the essence of travelling long distances—including the skills and knowledge required for this—and finally, how the sea contributes to shaping social identities. The relationship that people had with their environment, or nature–society interrelationships, is fundamental to archaeological research on land and at sea. Explicitly or implicitly, terrestrial archaeology presents us with something of an irreversible progression towards ‘encultured’ landscapes—narratives wherein the land becomes increasingly less natural and more cultural (see chapter 2). In much of Europe, the ‘enculturation’ of the world started back in the Post-glacial. It continued throughout the Mesolithic, with the creation of paths through, and clearances within, otherwise natural landscapes. In the Neolithic, ‘enculturation’ took place through deforestation, and through the apportioning of symbolic significance to natural features and the construction of monuments relating to these. By the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, large tracts of land were being accommodated to the needs of humans through the creation of field systems and settlements, producing ‘cultural landscapes’. From the middle Bronze Age onwards, according to accepted land-based archaeological thinking, it would appear that nature played at best a minor role, limited to the impact of climate and weather on the crops being cultivated. The study of the North Sea has fundamentally challenged the nature–culture dichotomy. The concept of ‘enculturation’ places Homo sapiens centre stage in a changing world, but underestimates the role played by the sea and rivers, as well as animals, trees, and plants, as important co-constructors of landscape.

The sea as a dynamic and hybrid landscape

Since the last glacial maximum, some 22,000 years ago, the North Sea basin has undergone many transformational changes. Largely covered by ice at the beginning of the period, it became successively an arctic-like tundra, a ‘park-like’ landscape of extended grassland with shrubs and trees, a tundra again, and a plain with light woodland cover that was submerged eventually by the expanding North Sea (Coles 1998: 69–75). As the North Sea rose, over the last 5,000 years, to within a few metres of its current level, the interior of the sea did not alter significantly apart from changes in tidal patterns and depth. But on the periphery of the North Sea basin, the slighter sea-level changes added to the effects of marine and alluvial sedimentation and erosion and produced, regionally, periods of marine transgression—when the influence of the sea moved landwards—and marine regression, resulting in the opposite effect. The North Sea, throughout its history, has been the dynamic landscape par excellence. The history of research into the North Sea basin goes back to the 19th century, and will be discussed further below, but it was Bryony Coles’ article ‘Doggerland: a speculative survey’ (1998), which first raised the profile of the Late-glacial and early Holocene archaeology of the North Sea and inspired many of the current research activities, especially those relating to the southern North Sea basin. The renewed interest in the Mesolithic and Neolithic archaeology of the North Sea has made some significant advances, and holds the promise of even greater returns once the high-resolution reconstructions of the North Sea Plain are integrated with the archaeological finds. A series of publications has recently presented new archaeological sites. New finds from trawler fishing along the various banks in the North Sea, and from the margins (e.g. Flemming 2004; Waddington and Pedersen 2007), as well as the use of SCUBA technology (e.g. in Fisher 1995), will be discussed below. This chapter offers brief overviews of the history of North Sea research, the creation of the North Sea, and the archaeological evidence of human activity in the period from about 10,000 to 2000 cal bc.