 Thank you, Vince. Good morning everyone. Yesterday we heard some very impressive and interesting results from the Lost Frontiers project, which really is showing us the way forward. What I want to do is to expand on the significance of submerged landscapes in a global context, the themes that they're relevant to, and the challenges that I see lying ahead of us. I think all of us are embarked on a research agenda that in my view is going to transform the way we look at world prehistory or world history, as we should call it. I shall pick up on some of the topics that James Walker talked about at the end of yesterday's session. And also what I had to say will serve as a sort of introduction to topics that other speakers in this session will talk about in more detail. Obviously there's a lot to cover in a world perspective and I will skip rather lightly over some issues. I will just put the PowerPoint on. Here we go. Now, I should confess that I am a terrestrial archaeologist I was trained as a terrestrial archaeologist I've been practicing terrestrial archaeology for all of my career. And with a particular interest in in coastlines and shell middens and the human impact of geologically unstable landscapes. I was aware right from the very beginning back in 1970 that there was a problem of missing evidence that like most terrestrial archaeologists, I was very skeptical that done about it. How would one set about it, what would be left to discover underwater, would it make any difference. And I think many people still have that feeling. 18 years ago I realized that I had to follow the logic of my own argument and get engaged in underwater archaeology, and I since become involved in a number of projects in many parts of the world with collaborative teams. There is growing momentum and worldwide interest in this problem, and that the archaeological investigation of continental shells is a worldwide challenge. And there's worldwide interest in how to meet that challenge. I should say that I still practice on shore archaeology and in an ideal world one should combine the onshore and the offshore work and try and integrate them. There are two very simple facts that have been staring us terrestrial archaeologists in the face for some many decades now, so simple that we've ignored them. Rather like the proverbial elephant in the room, we somehow hopes that we could carry on without recognizing the problem. I don't think we can go on doing that the first very simple fact, well known, but with huge consequences, and that is at sea level has been lower than the present for most of human history. This is a typical sea level curve generalized curve over the last 200,000 years, and for 95% of the time, sea levels have been lower than the present. And it is, of course, that if you want to know about the deep history of human interest in coastlines marine resources maritime activities, we're missing most of the evidence underwater. There are occasional bursts of coastal archaeology obviously after modern sea level established we see a vast explosion in numbers of coastal sites shell mounds hundreds of thousands all around the world. Back at the last high sea level 125 years ago there is a spike in the marine signatures of some coastal caves. Many archaeologists would like to see this as evidence of intensification associated with a modern human revolution, or a post glacial revolution. I think probably what we're looking at is simply a change in the visibility of coastlines. Of course there are caves coastal caves dotted around the continents that take us back to the last glacial some of which have fragments of evidence about collecting shellfish and fishing. But that's a very fragmentary and incomplete record and doesn't really help us to illuminate what people doing on these submerged coastline. And of course, this cycle of sea level change is on back into deeper into human history to half a million years, 800,000 years and even beyond. The second fact that we have to look at and this is Simon Fitch's very useful map showing the extent of drowned landscapes, various estimates but in round figures we're talking about 20 million square kilometers of extra land. If you want to know what that means on the ground, think of the size of the present year land mass of Europe and multiply by two. The southern hemisphere example take Australia and multiply by three or the whole of South America is a huge territories, and they're all missing from the record. So we're not only missing coastlines and what people were doing down on the shore. We're missing very extensive terrestrial territories. Coastal lowland some of which extended for 10s even hundreds of kilometers inland. This is a huge gap in our record we know it's there, and it's time that we tried to do something about it. All this drowned territory, a lot of it was very attractive territory coastal lowlands typically have milder climates better water supplies. The lower catchments of rivers and streams springs which are believed according to the coastal basis theory were more strongly flowing on the exposed continental shelf greater ecological diversity greater productivity for plants animals wetlands mangroves, generally speaking, relatively attractive territory, especially important during glacial periods when global climate generally speaking was more arid and water and more severe limiting factor. I don't want to over exaggerate this not all coastlines are uniformly good and not all hinterlands were uniformly bad but the balance of advantage. Very often, I suspect was towards these coastal lowlands. That is why they're so important to learn more about. Just a little bit more detail about sea level curves. This is Kurt Lambeck's 2014 curve. This is a curve of ice equivalent sea level, the amount of variations in the amount of water in the oceans, leaving out of account entirely issues of tectonics and isostatic adjustment and so on which greatly complicate the measurement of relative sea level, especially in places like the North Sea. Several things to note about this. First is that sea level stayed low, the last glacial maximum below 120 meters with little variation for nearly 15,000 years. Plenty of time for coastlines to become established marine communities to become established people living on shorelines to repeatedly visit locations often enough to accumulate archeologically visible signatures. When we look at these sea level curves, it's very easy to imagine that sea level was going up and down like a yo-yo in the Pleistocene and then stopped at 7,000 years ago and entered a period of stability in recent times. We have to be careful how we interpret these diagrams sea level didn't actually stop rising 6,800 years ago it has continued to rise slowly through about three meters present day. Also, when we see a steep line like this it's very easy to over dramatize the effect of sea level rise, the actual rate of sea level rise, the fastest rate according to the Lambeck diagram was about 1 meter, 1.2 meters per 100 years. Obviously the impact of that will vary depending on the topography of a coastline, but that's not a lot of sea level change. And by the way, that's the rate at which sea level is rising now. We are predicted to see sea levels rising by about that amount, meter to a meter and a half over the next 100 years. So there are cautions to state about sea level change and our interpretation. Themes, well, there are so many that I can do barely more than list them. Think about population expansion out of Africa. The significance of land bridges, we know there was a lot of land in the Aegean, the Arabian Peninsula and the so-called southern dispersal route. Submerged landscapes are significant in that region and there is a lot of controversy about the significance of those submerged landscapes for dispersal, as opposed to climatic changes periodically turned the interior of the Arabian Peninsula green. Controversy about the southern coastal route around the Indian Ocean Rim. Was it there? Was it not? Well, we won't know answers and resolutions to these controversies until we start investigating those submerged landscapes. They don't look very extensive on a map of the scale, but even a small extra increment of land at low sea level could be very significant. Then we get to this huge hole in Southeast Asia, two million square kilometers of ground landscape there alone and a comparable area in Australia. And those drowned landscapes hold clues to the movement of people into Australia. They were the places that people set off from on their journeys across the sea and these drowned landscapes in Australia were the locations of first landfall. Helen will talk a lot more about that later. It's the same story in North America. There's now intense interest in population movement across the Bering Land Bridge and then around the edge of the ice sheet. We know that sites were present south of the ice sheet and people must be going along ice-free corridors in the Northwest Pacific or island hopping. There's a lot of interest in this and a growing number of underwater sites and studies on both the Pacific and the Atlantic coastlines of North America. Intensification of marine resources development to seafaring was obviously going on during these low sea level periods during the last glacial colonization of high latitudes. The North Sea and Scandinavia and Scotland theme again happening when sea level globally speaking was lower than the present. Turning to the Mediterranean, we know that people were crossing to islands in the Aegean at least 12,000 years ago, perhaps much earlier. And that early farmers had a maritime component, as we know from those very interesting submerged sites along the coastline of Israel, must have been carrying their crops and their domestic animals by boat across sea crossings. And that that sort of maritime route was a significant pathway for agricultural expansion into Europe. And again, when sea levels were much lower than present, and where were the sites and the settlements and the harbours of these early seafarers? Well, many of them are now underwater. Both of cemetery settlements and coastal environments, they're where you expect bigger settlements and permanent settlements to get established. And probably this is something that was happening very early on. And then the big theme, of course, is how do people react to these sea level changes, not only sea level rising but sea level falling and exposing new territory to move into. When sea level rises, there's not a lot you can do. You can move if that is not too disruptive and the shoreline is not moving too fast. There are some defenses and there's some interesting evidence that this was happening at least 7000 years ago again on one of these submerged sites on the Israeli coastline. You can intensify other aspects of your economy. You can praise your gods. There is some speculation that the concentration of megalithic monuments and funerary ritual sites on some coastlines may symbolize that sort of response to the loss of ancestral territory by sea level rise. There are a lot of interesting questions here. Sea level change has been endemic in human history. And we should pay attention to it and it's been a very dynamic factor that must have interacted with the ways people viewed the world and established social and economic networks. Challenges, lines of investigation. Really I can only sort of in short order describe what they are and say a little bit more detail about some of them. Mapping of the inundation landscape is obviously going on. We heard a lot about that yesterday. There was a whole raft of new technologies, techniques, approaches that are being developed. I've done some of this work in the Red Sea and elsewhere. Other people are doing it. This is really the first step. What was that now submerged landscape like as a landscape of human potential? Where are the animals, the plants, the topography, the rivers, the coastlines, the hills, the valleys, the wetlands and so on. Finding archaeological sites and materials that of course is a huge challenge. Most sites that are known have often been found by chance by people walking along the beach and seeing things poking up in the intertidal zone. Sports divers, fishermen, public engagement is important here. And monitoring of what's going on on the shoreline is really a very valuable activity and has been responsible for recovery of many sites. We've got more than 3,000 fine spots underwater in Europe we know about. So there's a lot of material there waiting to be discovered. Obviously life gets more difficult when you go into deeper water. Predictive modeling is being practiced in a number of places, sometimes leading to the discovery of sites and sometimes not. And I think the failures so called are actually just as important as the successes because every underwater survey is teaching us something new about the nature of the sea bed and about the visibility or the lack of visibility of archaeological material. And that leads to what I think is now turning out to be a very important field of study. So what is it about sea level rise that means that some sites are destroyed, or obscured or disturbed, and other sites are preserved. This is the whole area of the study of site formation deformation, taffonomic issues. Really, it's difficult to enunciate any sort of general principles here. But to try and build up a series of case studies. If there are principles number one is that most material is vulnerable to erosion or damage as sea level rises. The real gets exposed to wave action and shallow water currents. But nevertheless, some material does survive. Why in some places, not in others, shell middens and caves and natural targets. But in fact, I think many of them have been removed or washed out or deflated in some way, but some haven't. Refuse areas I will say something about in a moment. Collaboration with offshore industries has produced spectacular finds and we'll hear more about that later. Certainly in Western Europe, legislation demands that offshore developers conduct preliminary work and they often have a lot of money and can give a lot of help. International networking and collaboration again, I'll say a little more in detail about that. There are a number of big networks, splash costs, well known. The Americans are trying to develop something similar that may or may not be called Aqua Terra, Splosh, the Southern Hemisphere, South Africa and Australia, Marginal Seas and so on. The scale of the work that we're engaged on here and the challenges really do demand large scale collaboration across disciplines is the norm in archaeology, but also across national boundaries and collaboration and networks that are worldwide. And because there is a big challenge here and a lot of energy and resources, resources need to work in concert meet those challenges. Something about preservation and toponomy. Venus sites are often held out as exemplars of the wonderful preservation preservation of organic material that get in underwater sites. It's not quite exactly like that. This is Tuber in V, which is one of the most famous of the underwater sites. What we're looking at here is actually what the Danes call a refuse area. The site itself was on dry land, but offshore is where a lot of material was abandoned or thrown into the water and sunk into the very soft sediments in that shallow water. This is how they got preserved and buried in anaerobic sediment. And this was before sea level rose. The actual dry land part of the settlement, the important bit has largely been eroded away except for occasional human graves, which of course were already dug into the soil and to some extent protected from wave action as sea level rose. But most of what was on the dwelling area of the settlement has gone or it's just stone tools and the occasional pit, post hole or other hole dug into the ground. There's quite an interesting analogy here with Lake Edge Science star car as a classic example, we'll hear more about that later. The organic stuff gets preserved because it's been thrown into the shallow water into the, the sort of swampy zone at the edge of the lake on dry land you basically have stone tools and post holes. And that's all that's left. And there is a paradox here that if material is going to be preserved. It's got to be buried under sediment during or before sea level rises, but then it ceases to be visible until something starts eroding it, whether it's human action, commercial activity or submarine channels. Or if one can have technologies that can actually see beneath surface, of course there's a lot of experimentation going on with those sorts of techniques. Shell mittens are a great interest to me. We've always assumed that they would be washed away, especially the open air ones which are the interesting ones. We have underwater shell mittens in Denmark now, number that are known. Also in the Gulf of Mexico, there's work going on on these sites recently published in these publications just the other day. The problem, of course, of disentangling water anthropogenic shell accumulations from natural shell accumulations on the seabed. And part of the, the technique here and the strategy is to look at geochemical and mineralogical signals in narrow diameter that can be pushed into the subsurface. SplashCos is one of these networks funded by European money, the tune of about half a million euros, and has really been a powerful accelerant in the development of the field in Europe with money for training for publications. It was a huge enterprise and it leveraged and stimulated a great deal of new research and grant applications, and so on. And influence quite significantly policy makers, we brought together heritage managers, industry representatives, marine geosciences, archaeologists, and so on. And also there are a number of publications, current count seven edited volumes came out of that networking, the ones in red freely available on the internet open access or downloadable and two big websites, you can find them on any internet search engine SplashCos is the network website with all this information. The SplashCos viewer is an online database that was also created as part of the SplashCos enterprise and that again is publicly accessible. So we are, in my view, embarking on new research agenda I still think we are in a pioneer phase at the beginning of what is probably going to turn out to be a 50 year research agenda, but I'm convinced that there are going to be new developments and they're going to change our view of world prehistory. 20 years ago, Nikki Milner and I published a paper posing the question are coastlines central or peripheral. And interestingly, I think the answer is, they're central, and that they have been marginalized by conventional views, which are mainly Eurocentric and Anglicone about the nature of prehistoric developments is a basically an on land process. And the dynamics that go with sea level change have played a very significant and so far under recognized role in world prehistory. So plenty to do, and plenty to think about, and a lot of new work waiting to be done. That's, that's me finished. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks, Jeff there. I'm sure you'll be around in 50 years to see it through as well. Right. So far, please do send in your any questions there's a comment more than anything from Trevor Faulkner about sea level rise and Swedish Baltic coast at 0.3 to 0.5 millimeters per year. I presume. I'm just trying to read these. What is the question that seems to be a statement. Okay, but I but I myself have a question. Yes, it's given that your it's a global talk. Well, how do you think the government strategies are operating in areas that you're active within it. I mean, you know, we've, we, everyone is talking about the level of resource needed. And these, this is clearly good. Even, even if firm industry is generous and presuming there must be action on government. It's a very mixed picture. As far as I know, there's a lot of talk and a lot of lip service, but of course everything lies in the implementation some countries are signed up to the UNESCO protocol on underwater material but signing up to it is one thing implementing it is another. There is EU legislation for those countries that are EU members, which has proved very productive and big industries, of course, often see the public relations benefit of putting money into some archaeological investigation is peanuts as far as they're concerned to spend a couple of million on some archaeological research with their billion dollar billion pound budgets, but with a good return in terms of public relations. In Australia doesn't yet cover indigenous archaeology only historic Rex and the airplane, so on. Saudi Arabia, nothing much there at the moment there is interest, but inevitably, even with there is government legislation, it all depends on the money. And even with monitoring, there may not be much incentive spend a lot of money on mitigation work. There's a question from Harry Robson. Great talk Jeff, we all agree. Are there any hotspots where you envisage further submerged shell mittens to be found. I mentioned briefly but didn't really expand on it certainly around the coastlines of the Gulf of Mexico, Southeast corner of the United States, Georgia, Florida, coming around that coastline. A lot of this material is now beginning to be discovered. It has been known about but as I said it's quite difficult sometimes to be sure that you've got a logical site rather than a natural feature. I think these shallow coastlines are promising and of course that's where you would expect to find the extensive mud flats and shell beds that generate the volume of material. I think we're feeling our way here. The big turning point will come and I think will bring a lot more people on board when we start getting a material as much deeper levels, which of course will be much earlier in date 20,000 60,000 years ago and we don't really know how shell mittens or any other sort of material would be preserved at that sort of depth and how we would discover it, but I think those are challenges that we should busy and try and meet future.