 Fodd y cyffin ohol ar yr inspire. Fodd arnyn nhw, y cwmdd Rhe probiot, yn y chyddi'r llygwyr, i'r cyffin hithredol a'i chyddi'r llythegos. Fodd dengraeth yr enw. Fodd y cyffin hithrediadau wrth ei hwnnw yn y cyffin hithrededd ar y cyffin hithrededd cael y cyffin hcynfod. Galli'r anodd llythg yng Nghymru mae'r anodd llythgai'r gfor i'r canfyn from America through North West Europe, Golf, Southeast Asia down to to Australia. These are critical areas at various periods for understanding the people of the earth and the archaeology of the regions. The area of the North Seaelines, Dogarland isn't the largest of these areas but as has already been stressed It is amongst the best studied of these areas. And that is of critical importance to today. However, we have to, in city, in sitting set alongside the multitude of presentations we're going to hear from various parts of Britain in the world. This today is about Europe's lost frontiers. This is the result of a single project, as Jeff has said in the opposite funded. Advanced grant. It's been, it's run over five years. It's brought together about 40 academics all the way from Cork to China to look at the landscapes of the Southern North Sea, and this has included archaeologists, environmentalists, geneticists, software engineers and modellers to look at the problems. Sorry, you're not sharing slides. No slides. That must be better. Yes? Yeah, that's it. Thanks then. Okay, not a problem. Well, it is for you. Anyway, I would go on to the fact that we're looking at the collaboration over the past five years to look at the Southern North Sea. Like all good projects, it has a backstory. We know that there's been research related to the Southern North Sea for about probably 200 years. There's only though been certain points and certain people who've probably progressed the research in this area in dramatic ways, which have allowed other people to do more research. You can go back to obviously the great work of Clement Reed back in 1913, his book on submerged forests. Graham Clark, who's well the doyen of Mesolithic archaeology in the UK, who was well aware of the potential of the Southern North Sea, if rather perplexed about what you could actually do to understand it, I would suggest. And of course, Brynny Clark, Brynny Cullsrother, who's working in 1998 on dog-a-land, a speculative survey is the springboard for much of what you're going to hear over the next two days and probably inspired many of the people to do work in this area. The last 20 years though has seen champions of research on prehistoric inundated landscapes. Jeff, Nick Fleming, the networks they've created have been critical to how we've brought together a community to work in a much larger sense. It's probably worth remembering though what archaeology actually constituted 20 years ago. If the whole area wasn't discounted as a land bridge between Britain and Europe, it was essentially a series of maps with almost no information in it, which would for any archaeological sense of any rate, reconstructions that relied on inherently irrelevant bethymetry, which generally didn't reflect the land surface as well we were looking at, and a whole series of artifacts which were generally trod, transfined of relatively little archaeological significance, although we're getting more and more out of this data, I should say. But even the iconic Le Mananua point highlighted by Clark falls into this gap, and in fact its history has been revised in recent years. The onset of Lost Frontiers though has to go back to the North Sea Paleo Landscapes as Jeff has said, because much of what happened there has formed or guided the work that was done within Lost Frontiers. It was largely a product of a series of chance encounters, actually starting with the initiation of a PhD by Simon Fitch looking at the use of 3D seismic data from oil and gas to look at these blank maps that we had in the North Sea. That was facilitated by Ken Thompson, a basin geomorphologist who worked in the project and sadly died in 2007, who introduced us to the industry. PGS provided through their good officers initially 6000 square kilometres of seismic data to see if we could actually find anything. I don't believe they were holding their breath at the time. However, the results were such that within a relatively short time his English heritage through the aggregates levy, remember that, provided funding to look at about 24000 square kilometres of seismic data on the basis of this earlier work. That provided the mapping doggaland book and the basis for all our future work following that. It is worth, however, remembering something about the problems and technical issues there. We were relatively well supported in IT terms, but actually if you look at it, the core storage for analysing 24000 kilometres was 5 terabytes, which would clearly not support any of the massive data sets we're looking at today. But this, to a certain extent, reflected the limitations of what we were doing. We were looking at relatively coarse data, provided good overviews of specific types of features. We were also only looking at the top half second of the seismic columns. That's essentially the mesolithic. We knew that there were earlier landscapes beneath that, which we could see. But for commercial reasons, we weren't actually allowed to look at that at the time. Now that wasn't necessarily a bad thing, because we probably couldn't have used the exponential data that would have arrived if we attempted to do so. Another point was how we looked at the data. The information was very good at allowing us to volume render river channels, estuaries, lakes, features of that sort, which were important because we felt that was be where we would find the environmental sediments that would allow us to take major steps forward as we went forward. But it also meant we were only looking at particular parts of this landscape, even though we hadn't seen them before. It also told us something else that was important. When we had these maps of landscapes we presumed or features we presumed early Holocene, they almost had no relationship to the existing sedimentary archive. Virtually none of the cause that existed within the area we were studying were of relevance to our own work directly. It was clear if we wanted plants, if we wanted animals, if we wanted ultimately people, we were going to have to do work which was directed for archaeological purposes. We did expand the areas that we were looking at with the American funding from NOAA and help from the Dutch Geological Service. We expanded the area within the southern North Sea into the eastern sectors with an Anglo-Welsh aggregate funding. We went off to the west coast, looking at the Irish Sea and the Seven Estuary. Critically, though, with the British Geological Survey, we were able to participate in the Humber Regional Environmental Characterisation Project. That allowed us to ground truth some of the features we are seeing. You have to understand that a decade ago, or slightly more than a decade ago, some people at least didn't believe we were looking at early Holocene features. So being able to actually ground truth this was critical for the future development within the North Sea and the Humber Rec allowed that. Certainly by 2013, we'd managed to get an outline map of about 45,000 square kilometres of early Holocene landscape in the areas that were amenable to study. Not all were the shallower areas, particularly to the south and the east, were not so well conducive to mapping that was an issue. Now this slide is, I think, quite important. It is 11 years old. This was what we were thinking in around 2010. Ben Geary's most favourite quote, all models are wrong, some models are useful there. We realised that we weren't looking for post-hulls. We realised we wanted to explore and populate landscapes, but there were real problems. The scales at which we worked, the resolutions at which we worked, weren't actually conducive to looking at the archaeological behaviour as such. The temporal distribution of mapable units was also a problem. We produced a lot of features. We had dates for virtually none of them, and that was a problem. Also we had hints of the geological complexity of the data that was within the data, but we couldn't resolve an awful lot of that. Put that together with the fact that we were actually looking at smaller areas of landscape because of the nature of the 3D seismic surveys themselves. That meant we knew that we couldn't move forward to the level of archaeological consideration that we wanted to. We needed to do more complex work. That's when Europe's lost frontiers came in. Now it took three years of planning to get this project. However, we had, we thought, a very simple and elegant plan. We were going to do near total mapping of the early Holocene landscapes. We'd have a programme of targeted coring down river valleys so we could look at the inundation process chronologically and get the sediments that we knew must be there to give us an insight into the environment of the landscapes we were looking at to go beyond just a bare topographic map. All of this we hope would run alongside a computer simulation which would allow us to look at the dynamic environments and explore it in a three and four dimensional manner. We got our study areas, much of which again actually correlated with the work areas we've been looking at within the North Sea Pally Landscape projects with a nod towards the north to what we thought at the time was northern doggaland. This has changed as you will see particularly in the lecture by Simon Fitch following this. But of course the moment you start a project, the first casualty is your plan, that lovely elegant simple plan that we had and part of the problem was Brexit. We immediately had problems in licensing. We weren't allowed to do the numbers of calls that we expected and we had to revise what we were doing. However, that allowed us to change some of the plans that we'd had and from moving from the two river valleys that we'd intended to look at on the doggalbank and coming out of the wash, a large river valley going east west. We also moved towards a smaller valley, slightly to the south, which gave us a good access to the whole of the course of this particular valley down to an estuary. That proved to be a very significant change, as you will see in the papers that follow this. We also went out off the west coast. We weren't going to be stuck in just the North Sea. Working with our Irish colleagues, IT Slygo, the Marine Institute, we had access to the Celtic Voyager to work in the Cardigan Bay in the Irish Sea. The weather for this was awful. It meant that we couldn't collect data in the Irish Sea and for a while I thought we were going to lose James Bunsell as well. We suffered terribly during that voyage, but we did collect work in Cardigan Bay and this will be looked at by Rachel Harding later today. We also critically began a collaborative work with our Belgian and Dutch colleagues and this was important because it also gave us access to research vessels to allow an iterative process of development. We were particularly interested in the Brown Bank, an area where there's a concentration of mesolithic artefacts which we thought we could link to surfaces which might be eroding out. It also allowed us to look at the southern river estuary in detail because we felt at least that there would be exposed surfaces there which might expose actually archaeological artefacts that we could make perhaps even prospectful as will be reported again later. We produced essentially about 109 cores across all these areas. Some of these are duplicates, some of them are actually weren't very useful, but nonetheless the important thing about this though is this iterative process was only successful because we had access to research vessels provided through European partnerships. We had the ability to do this through UK means it would have been impossible that we have almost no access to the level of resource we require and as we go forward this is something that is going to have to change within the UK. When it came to the results, well, as you will see today, we have produced I think insights into methodologies for specific technologies and areas of research, we've produced specific case studies related to these. In some areas we've been able to aggregate this data to produce significant outputs down to individual events. The work we did on the Storega in particular demonstrates the capacity to bring this work together. It's also of course shown some of the problems. The area is complex. It's much more complex than we've anticipated but now we're starting to see it. This is a fractally complex area and bringing this data together has been a problem in sometimes contradictory as you'll see but that's part of the challenges of working here. The other point I'm afraid has been COVID. We are a year behind where we expected to be. We had expected to come with monographs in hand. That is not the case. We'll be running to November but now you will be able to see where we are, how the results of much of the work and the overall significance of what we're doing. With that and under the BDI of Jeff, I will now stop and hand over to the people who did the work. Thank you very much. Thank you, Vince, for that introduction. That is actually one question that's popped up in the chat box from Bob Bewley. He refers to the aggregate levy fund which supported some of your earlier work. He says as far as he knows that fund still exists but it now goes into the UK government treasury and he wonders whether there's any chance of resurrecting that fund for your sort of research. I think the aggregates levy saved most of British archaeology during the beginning of the century. If that were possible to free up some of this it would be critical. It really spurred research in these areas and we have to make the case to the British government. I don't think I can emphasise too much that this area around the whole of the UK is under resource. We can't keep relying on other people to keep our research going.