 Hopefully everyone can see that, I'm going to take that as a yes, it's been one of the lines of the last year or so of doing online presentation, online teaching, assuming the tech is working. Anyway, thank you Richard for that introduction. I'm speaking on behalf of a collective environmental archaeologists, I don't know what the collective noun is for a group of environmental archaeologists, anyone has any suggestions please put it in the chat. So it's myself, I'm standing on behalf of Dr Kevin Carney, we can hear at UCC, Wendy Carruthers, David Smith, University of Birmingham and Matt Law Bath Spa. I'll be honest, this is going to be kind of a broad overview of the results of our work to date. It's by no means exhaustive and it's by no means final and in many ways, I think where we are and this probably comes through with Martin's excellence or previous, I hope it's kind of given a really good introduction to the landscape we're investigating. In many ways, I think we've come up with probably more questions and answers, which I think is a good thing but certainly some of the key questions I'll return to in this I think are relevant in terms of how we understand dogland as a landscape on different scales. So that's something that hopefully I'm going to touch on. So the the cores I'm going to talk about are only four of the cores and as I say these analyses are by no means complete. So we've got core 34 that's been mentioned already, we have core 51 which is down here and we have core seven and 20 which is over here. So again, Martin gave you a reasonable idea of the scale of the landscape. I think it's very easy when you're working on submerged landscapes to kind of lose the idea of scale that we're so used to when we're working on terrestrial areas. I really like Martin's image of the Thames Valley, that gives you an idea of the kind of issues, I suppose around scale and interpretation. Anyway, so I'm going to begin with L34. This is sorry about this, this is the saddle core that Martin mentioned earlier, it's a small wetland, fresh water wetland perched on what Martin refers to the saddle and every time he says saddle that's what I think apologies. I'm really going to look at the bottom part of this core so really a 50 centimeter section at the bottom. So it's a series of organic clays and silts into a peat. Tom Hill is going to return to say a bit more about the silts and clays in particular that's really important in terms of the formation of this small fresh water wetland. So just bear that one in mind for the subsequent presentation. I should also at this stage lodge the following trigger warning. I'm really sorry there are going to be pollen diagrams in this talk. I can only apologize for that. Again, I think there's a few paleocologists in the group I looked through earlier. I think I saw Michael Grant now, I'm sure there's some others. This is a bit of a bussman's holiday. I'd hope to come up with some kind of user friendly way of talking about the pollen data but we've not had a chance to do that so I'm sorry. I'll try and make it as painless as I possibly can. Okay so here we go lovely pollen diagram. This is L34 so again you can see this at the bottom which I'm just going to pull up a pen here just to help us out a bit here. So most of the diagrams have the chronology plotted down this side here. Again these are provisional chronologies, most of them. In this case we have the results of some of Dr. Eric Hampton's Bayesian modelling of that sequence and straight away I'm sure you can see that this is basically we're going back into the interstadial here, into Windermere and we do have more of the record above here for various reasons I'm not going to talk about that. We're still working on aspects of it but the release is just to kind of give you a run through of I suppose the general pattern of what we know about vegetation history of doglands from this data. So again what you can see here is really the pattern of vegetation change is both very typical of the interstadial. We have an open landscape at the bottom here and again you can just read across the chronology here or here. An open landscape dominated by grasses, sedges, very few trees or shrubs. Willow is certainly present, usually represented in Juniper. You can see the Juniper peak here that's very typical of this part of the interstadial, so the expansion of juniper scrub and then subsequent decline. You can also see there's some other trees and shrubs in here, not least betula which will also draw your attention to the fact that these are these are selected tax randomly pollen diagrams. What is notable for almost all these records is the generally very very low presence of herbs in the most part not a huge diversity in generally very low values, kind of often the same for aquatics but you can see here we do have aquatic plants down here at the bottom such as myriothalam, that's water mill foil and things like reed mace and pondweed as well. So here's our record going through and we can bring in some of Wendy's macrofossil data at this point that kind of fills out the picture. So as we're moving into the interstadial and as the peach starts to form we definitely have a wetland suburge willow fenncar. We have evidence in the macrofossil record for both tree and shrub birch at that point and again another kind of range of wetland aquatic plants and tacks that won't be surprising I suppose in this kind of freshwater context. So we've got many anthes, we have them fair, sedges, lemdots, duckweed and we also have and I think I apologize to David who I think is listening in I think I only have one reference to his beetle dates he's still working on that and hopefully that this will start to fill out the picture and here excuse me he reports he has a single elytrum that's a winged case of tannisphorus lemni which is associated with you can probably guess with with the duckweed there and that's actually from slightly further at the sequence. So this is our earliest part of the record again you can think of this in terms of I suppose if you think in terms of human activity across dogland I guess in the terrestrial context this might be the source of location that in a very environmentally deterministic way a papallelithic or mesolithic one together is maybe drawn towards and again that's something we can talk about and certainly not saying that is definitely the case but again I suppose in terms of predictive thinking and modelling that's that's important. Okay so moving on sorry another poem diagram so he's moving on slightly in time so again we're here we have our chronology so we're moving into into the start of the holocene and again you can see that quite clearly here we have the expansion of birch then we have pine and then slightly later on as we get into the holocene proper you know typical range of deciduous trees such as oak and quite high values for them actually comparatively for dogland. I wonder whether that's something to do with the calcareous deposits perhaps that Martin referred to earlier and a very pronounced corollus rise there and again these chronologies are provisional but that's happening about 11,200 cow BP so we're going from again a very open landscape possible evidence for reworking in here that's fernsport often the indicator of reworked sediment I should say however the pollen preservation is generally pretty good also willow is again very important very significant for most of this part of the record very underrepresented analogically so certainly present on the wetland soils locally and macrofossils preservation is poor again the macrofossil preservation seems to vary quite significantly between the cores for a variety of reasons I think I think we need to discuss and pick apart and certainly we'll see with the beetle data in particular on that front the work we did on the Humber REC David Smith's data I seem to recall he had quite small formulas but some quite interesting ones you might want to talk to that afterwards and some of those quite interesting in terms of evidence for woodland and trees if I'm right there David again poorly preserved there are various other wetland taxa in the macrofossil record again stuff that I suppose I'm surprising Potomac-Eaton pondweed again typhoon reed mace rushes myriothelum that's water mill foil so again all these plants that typical of largely freshwater environments and what's interesting is really how rarely we see this in turning up in some of the pollen records we often have this discrepancy between the pollen and the macrofossil records as well okay how am I doing that good okay so moving on a bit to ELF 20 and I'm just looking at this section of ELF 20 so this is the bottom moving upwards so we're going from kind of the tail sterile tail deposits into kind of sandy organically silts and eventually into this peak unit here so again it's a relatively a relatively short sequence and again this is what it looks like again there's our calibrated ranges so you can see we're going back into the end of the into the localomans the stadial and then into the Holocene above and again it's very clearly reflected in the stratigraphic changes you see where we go essentially from organic sands into kind of more organic peats and silts and so forth and so we get this really kind of black peat here and again the pollen doesn't hold a huge number of surprises we see in course a birch coming in here scott's pine and again as we see later oak and less elm here and again really important willow that shows very much a local presence nearly kind of 50% of total lump pollen so what we also see is a kind of evidence for open ground they're going to come back to this in a minute and I think we're quite unclear in terms of what we can and can't say about the structure of the vegetation of dogland that is a terrestrial landscape if you like and again as I said earlier if we look at the aquatic records we have some of these species turning up and the reason there's very few herbs plotted is again this is selected taxa and kevin just pulled out the ones that are better reflected so we have things like apiaceae that's the carrot family's tall herbs and the chinapodia aci that includes that's the hen family that includes plants that are saline or typical of salt marshes so we do get curve coming in here and that is significant because as we'll see with tom's talk this is an important core in terms of understanding this transition from fresh to brackish into saline and tom's going to talk more to that later but again what is interesting the preservation of macros is poor again the specular remains in there showing a plexus that's a soft reed rush which I think is largely fresh water but can be a can be a bit marine we also have in here some more kind of marine to brackish taxa we have nyus marina and rupymaritima that's hollywood nyus that's nyus rupymaritima is the wonderfully named widgen grass or widgen weed I think it's sometimes called ditch ditch weed and that's that one's typical of brackish environments but generally we don't see a huge evidence of perhaps what you may or may not expect at the transition from I suppose fresh water to brackish and saline environments and that's important in terms of what martin talked about some of the other points that came up earlier particularly in terms of how we understand process and pattern of change and again other things we might note here these quite high values for toroxida that's fern scores and there is certainly summary working but again the preservation is fairly decent and what else might we say here again there's other ferns in here there's poly podium common poly poly it's a little fern probably epithetic on oak trees so I suppose we're starting to get a broad impression of the general I suppose pre-submergent vegetation of doggalund and it seems to be broadly a deciduous woodland corollous hazel and if you ever count causal samples from doggalund from submerged landscape you will see a lot of hazel I think kevin is probably sick this stage of counting samples of hazel and so a bit more about that in a minute I think there's a certain amount of taffanomic control going on with that representation now we're doing for time okay that's about so I promise this I think this is the last problem diagram just bear with me so yeah elf seven and again very similar sequence we have these basal peats and again the basal peats there is some variation in the date ranges this is something I think we need to work on more um I think Derek might say a bit more about this later on but the the age range for these at these freshwater peats and you know pre kind of rising water table and channel agredation in a lot of these contexts and again what we see here there's no chronology so so again a bit later into the Holocene a very typical as we've seen in reddy higher birch sorry higher oak baggy problem again elm is quite high we have pine in there what you might also notice and probably I imagine the paleoacrologist some stratigraphy amongst you and noticing this is our pollen donations which are here often track or identical with stratigraphic changes in these units so you can see that this is I think taffanomic so again we're seeing shifts as the depositional changes in terms of the representation and reflection of different woodland taxa in particular okay and this is interest this is notable sorry of less willow in here again this is our grass curve you might ask well what does this show us about the uh degree of openness of the landscape um that's a moot point I think certainly some of this curve is coming from wetland grasses we can't separate out wetland grasses such as Fragmites common reed from dryland grasses so some of this is certainly in channel some of it is probably almost coming from certainly from the wider landscape but again what do we see in the herbs these are selected taxa very little sedges in here this is plantago lancelar so which is much below it of paleoacologists because it's what we call an anthropogenic indicator as in it's a plant that grows in open conditions and is typically associated with the opening of woodland mainly in the neolithic at least in most northwest europe earlier in elsewhere but very very low values these are trace values sorry waste your cross that's a trace value so we are getting traces what does that show does that show human activity now I don't think it does I actually don't think we have any compelling evidence for direct human impact in palurgical nature at least you might also ask about charcoal records generally very low values of charcoal turning up throughout these cores even at the base where quite often you can see increased levels of charcoal and some of these basal peats from the subliminal sea and again aquatic as you can see there there are some not huge numbers macrophosals if we look at the basal woody peat because i'm at about nine thousand two hundred nine thousand four hundred feet it's dominated by birch remains again so this is a woody peat with birch certainly growing locally and I think we can refer oak is in there as well somewhere as well and our general range of aquatics typhoon lemmon and car wrecks and incidentally that's lemmon that's duckweed and I was just doing a bit of research before the talk apparently duckweed this is actually nothing to do with dogland ladies and gentlemen I think apparently duckweed is going to be the next miracle crop apparently I've just learned that so I'll pass that information on to you and so yeah we do have duckweed Wendy was talking today Wendy Crowther's about possible climatic significance of lemmon and that's something we need to look into in terms of perhaps the earlier part of the record where we have the presence of duckweed anyway so it's a kind of pull a little bit of this together what what can we say I think in terms of a broad picture we're starting to certainly fill that out so we can say certainly that the if you like the early dryland vegetation of dogland is dominated by trees as they expand at the end of the at the end of the luster stadium so we have pine in there we've seen already we have oak we have we have hazel again we see hazel in very high percentages in the record and I suspect this doesn't really reflect its its actual dominance in vegetation think we have an over representation of hazel in there and again I'm going to come back to hazel in a minute because I think the representation of tree pollen in some of these deposits particularly as we shift from peat to silt prior to the complete inundation of dogland we do not see that inundation in the pollen and I think that is also taffanomic so to come back to an earlier point and a question that was asked at the end of Martin's talk what is the structure of this woodland I must I'm I'm unclear on that I think as a group was slightly unclear there are perhaps other ways into thinking about that that's not something we've really done yet from the pollen record you say that we would say the woodland is probably quite closed in the area where at least it's drier for some of these uh deciduous trees to grow we obviously have substantial open wetland areas as we've seen not just the rivers but other locations such as l 34 where we have um we have the saddle uh wetland fresh water fen car certainly at least in the earlier period this is plan tego lancia lata I mentioned earlier and as we've seen as I've said we have very very few records of it generally single grains and I think it can sell it with some confidence even for the cause that I've not shown you we hardly ever see that one turning up at all and burning I've mentioned again burning charcoal in in in deposits associated with the with the mesolithic in particular uh often reflecting human activity I'm sure this is something uh professor mill and I talk to tomorrow in terms of star car where burning of reed beds is almost certainly happening um again in in in these cores that we've looked at um I think it's fair to say with very low levels of charcoal what does that show well most these areas of wetland quite wet wetland as we've seen so really the possibility of burning um is I think very low whether that's natural or anthropogenic again that contrasts quite interesting with other cores from the southern North Sea certainly some of the cores we have from the Humber rec projects and the offshore cores contained um high quantities of charcoal and there are other cores from this area against colleagues in the audience might want to say something about this in the chat or afterwards and but certainly we don't have very high levels of charcoal at all in these um in these cores in terms of the wetland part of the landscape as we've seen already on the wetter soils so l 34 and a few of these other wetland deposits and certainly the channels as they start to activate and as the peaks shift from uh semi-terrestrial if you like to open water deposition of silts clays and organic material as we've seen already we shift really from dominance of taxes such as willow and birch through to um to reed and again at sometimes some of these uh slightly more brackish salt tolerant taxa but again that's not something we see enormously clearly in the in the pollen record and again there's a number of reasons for that so what else can we say I mean underlying all of this I mean this is great to talk about uh ecology and vegetation history and records and that that is really important at the end of the day you know what we want to try and do is get at what some of this data means for human activity where human activity might be happening the nature of that human activity so forth um there are a number of reasons why this is is technically difficult um particularly in terms of moving if you like from a core or a series of cores to if you want to think of it in terms of the reconstruction of a transgressive surface I think there's something we'll hear a bit more about later on in terms of the modeling of that and also this brings in obviously other data such as tom's um tom's uh sea level data that he's going to talk a bit about and obviously martin's data so we need to kind of bring this all together but we also have these insensitive problems sediment compression is likely to be significant I mean these peaks in particular are squashed to um squashed to hell would be the polite word you know really squashed down so we've got great levels of compression what that means for chronology is another matter that's something we've kind of been talking about with them with with tim and derrick um of that swerve as well so ways maybe around thinking about compression and allowing for that um in terms of inferences about vegetation change relative sea level change and spatial and chronological patterns of inundation yeah that that is a problem we need to unpick and obviously on the line all this is is uh what a couple of years ago I coined the phrase I'm sure that people have used this you know disaster or no big deal scenarios that concern the flooding or the end of doggaland and so these rapidity of change and you know how punctuated these access are this data comes into this somewhere but quite how we integrate that not just in a methodological sense but in a more theoretical sense as well is another problem that continues to play because hopefully that's something we kind of move to can move to address in one way or another so yeah underlying this again is this is a particularly an issue as I've said already as these sequences and as this river valley shifts from if you like being I suppose the initial aggregation of the peaks through to the channel aggregation as the channel activates at sea level rises and this is a this is an estuary not too far from from here in lovely sunny cork and you can see the issue here so so as you know here's the drylands here are our channel deposits this is obviously a tidal estuary so we have all these sorts of issues in terms of how we interpret the the pollen record and particularly what we see in many of the pollen records from this project and also from the wreck is very high levels of deciduous tree pollen in particular um hazel right up until you pretty much get inundation why is that does that mean that hazel is growing on mudflats no it doesn't where is the dryland can we think in terms of obviously we don't have deeply sized valleys like this where we might have as in San Francisco England might have trees growing in close proximity tidal inlet I don't think we have that I think we have a taffonomic issue with very high representation of tree and shrub pollen up these river systems further towards the dryland okay how am I doing Richard has appeared so that can only mean my time is nearly up so I'm going to leave you with this summary so so really we have an excellent dataset here and we're starting to address some of these questions we need to do a lot more integration of the datasets we certainly have um my favorite word uh taffonomic issues in here in particular what we call the RSAP the relative source area pollen for these deposits that are tidal or intertidal are very large we're resolving vegetation on a large scale macrosal and beetle work is ongoing that's starting to help us understand some of these difference between local extra local and regional representation and hopefully that's going to move us towards reconstructing patterns of flooding changes in dryland vegetation across what we might call the transgressive surface so please uh watch this space thank you for listening thank you very much Ben um so we've got a few minutes left for questions here um we've had some comment first uh about the Netherlands and the Angsy harbour and that there's evidence of repeated burning in full marshy environments and that kind of follows on with a question um about the charcoal and whether you can determine the species of charcoal and if this has been done speak I that's with Wendy as far as I can gather from my discussions with Wendy I think the charcoal fragments are very small so I don't think they're identifiable that's a very good point there and certainly one uh one we can look into about generally the levels of charcoal are pretty you know pretty small yeah and that certainly seems to come up from your from from what you've presented there um there's a question here um Sasha Krueer has has asked about um explain the very high percentage of uh Sykes 45 percent in elf 20 given that it is insect pollinated yes exactly yeah I mean that shows an extremely localised presence of of willow yeah again the paleocologists in the audience will recognize 20 percent is of total ump on is very high and that shows a very local presence of willow so again you know we we have this kind of again it's a tough and on control willow is growing on the on these wetlands in these wetland deposits I think the dna people might say something about that as well um again so so yeah that that shows so it's very much that local presence it's a good point um great thanks uh so a question from Patricia sure uh what do you think the cause is um the discrepancy between pollen and macro signatures that's that's several lectures all on its own I guess this is an often issue for multiproxy investigations um there are there are a variety of reasons for that um including possibly redeposition reworking pollen productivity um again the difference between where vegetation is growing in the landscape and I suppose the point to be made there is this is always the joy of multiproxy and I think there's always sometimes an assumption that we carry out more analyses and everything will converge and it's often the way that we carry out more analyses and some things converge and some things go in different directions so uh it was probably easier back in the day when you just did pollen and it was fine you know um yeah um so there is a question here Lauren Brown has put towards uh uh the thoughts on hazelnut willow cops in um or conservation as a practice I presume uh sorry as in the sense of um in the kind of mesolithic I suppose is that is that the sense that's sorry yeah well I think I think we're probably too early to see that I mean certainly high levels of hazel are very typical you know of the early holocene there's a lot of discussion about the rapidity of the apparent rapidity of the hazel the hazel rise at the start of the holocene and this is something that's been quite a lot written on talentiles work in particularly suggesting that willow is probably growing locally right up to start you know before the holocene but it's not producing which pollen and then you get this very steep increase as the climate improves drastically and that's increases the pollination so I think this is that's that's probably what we're seeing there but again we need to look into a bit more as well. I think you know time for one last question um from Steen Hildebrandt um if there has ever been any study of the recent pollen in the uppermost sediment layers of different river valleys for comparison? Yeah that's that's a really really good question um the answer to that is yes there has been and we certainly know that some of these these estuarine systems that yeah you're recruiting pollen from from all over from all over the place you know the bigger the bigger the system the bigger your pollen source area so so yeah I think that that is certainly something that is is at work as we shift into these these estuarine or mudflat deposits and yeah we're just seeing we're seeing a certain amount of of reflection of that the size of that source area so it's very frustrating you know because we see these you can kind of sometimes with the cores you can kind of go well there's the end of dogland you know there's the it's conformable we shift from the sands to the marine gravels and then your pollen records just saying yeah there's definitely hazel right and so you know gaysmen in general can there's obviously not the hazel that's growing somewhere else I think so that is a problem. Well thank you Ben we're just about on time there and so um we'll leave your presentation