 Thank you, Jeff. Why isn't that? There we go. Okay, good morning everybody. What I'm going to be talking to today is the core material and what we do with the cause and how we provide the cause to, to the rest of the specialists and to give you a sort of flavor within the context of the Southern River Valley which Simon has previously talked about. I'm a bit like a ringmaster here I just gather everybody else's data and parcel it up and do things with it and interpret it so this is based on, this talk is based on lots of people's work but I would like to point out John Whitaker who whose role is crucial in the, the approach that we've adopted and you'll see how this works in due course. I'm not being able to move forward. Okay, so I'm going to talk about the landscapes why landscapes I just like those quotes by Crawford about the intellectual delights of working on past geographies. I just thought I'd share those with you. But I'm really talking about this area here this is the Southern River Valley that Simon was talking about he showed you seismic line across the mouth of the valley here. And it's this area here and all the cause that's really from the focus of my talk today. So, here we are in these blue dots here are the cause and the location of the cause in the Southern River Valley between these postulated and moraines of the ice. During the last cold stage and of course we're off the East Anglian coast here. And just outside this white zone where we don't have any data that Mark was referring to before. So these are our cause we got 33 sample locations. Approximately some of these core locations have more than one core, they've been replicated. But we've got 33 sample locations. The cause that we're talking about range from a meter in length to up to five meters in length. Some of them, like core 38 over here goes straight into till others fully penetrate the Holocene some don't get to the bottom of the Holocene and some are in bedrock. So they vary in terms of what's in them and how long a record they preserve. And I should think about 50% of those 33 cores have sequences in them that have been used for the environmental reconstruction of this area. Now just to show you how big an area we're talking about because I think it's quite difficult very often to think about the scale and scope of some of these landscapes where they're buried down beneath the sea. So what I've just done here is superimposed a map of the Lower Thames on to our Southern River Valley. So here you can see the northernmost cause here's the mouth of River Valley here and this is the Lower Thames from Central London and the houses of Parliament down to the areas that's swinging out into the more open estuary. So we're dealing with a valley that's about that length and I think that's quite important because when we think about the number of data points about the number of lines of information that we're trying to use to reconstruct this landscape. We need to bear in mind the sort of scale of the landscape that we're talking about. It's also worth pointing out that while in a situation like the Lower Thames we're dealing with a River Valley where most of our sequences along the main River Valley are used to reconstruct the main processes that have been going on in that landscape. Sometimes the little tributary valleys are also equally if not more important. So for example in the Lower Thames the absolute this tiny little insignificant valley here preserves a really important record of environmental change both during the Holocene and back into the Pleistocene. So when we're thinking about niches and locations in which humans might be doing things we need to bear in mind the different scales that we're working at. The other thing to bear in mind. Again I'm using an example from the Lower Thames here from the Dartford Bridge out towards the estuary. This is an attempt to reconstruct the early Holocene landscape beneath the flood plain based on 880 data points. It's still difficult even without high resolution of data and we've got 33 data points in our landscape, but of course we also have the seismic data which we don't have in the Lower Thames. So these are all just things to ponder and think about when we're trying to reconstruct these sorts of landscapes. So the model we're using for this landscape is that of a tide dominated estuary as in this model by Dalrymple where we have marine dominated and a meandering river dominated parts of the estuary and where we go from tidal channels through mud flat salt marsh into freshwater wetland and that just gives you the sort of sense of how we begin to think about this landscape and how it's operating. So in a sort of long profile through the river and this has become important later on we move from open estuarine marine conditions through brackish tidal mud flats into a tidal river and into the freshwater river. And these are obviously all associated with their own unique assemblages of plants and animals and also sediment types as indicated there. And those are not an exhaustive list of the types of sediments we'd find in those areas of course. So when we've been looking at the doggaland cores and we've been working on them we can find in this landscape, all of these sorts of environments of deposition and associated sedimentary sequences and you can see that the cause core numbers down here not all of these are hastened to add come from the southern river, but majority of them do. What we don't see, apart from freshwater marsh sequences peak deposits here are what I would call true terrestrial deposits. We don't see colluvium, we haven't seen anything in any of our cores that resembles the sort of colluvial sequences that you'd find either in the Lake Glacier or in the Holocene. And we don't see well developed paleosols in any of these locations even where we're drilling on the the tail where you'd expect potentially a paleosol to be developed, we don't see these. And this is perhaps not surprising because the the cores have been located away from those sorts of situations in many cases to get the big picture story. Let me show you what the sort of sequences might look like in if we were to able to see them on an open section on the seabed. This is the sort of basal peak that we see in the Thames and this is the sort of peak that we see in a number of our cores in the southern elsewhere. So basing again the sort of anticipated sequences that we might find in our system on the sort of model for southern England this is the sort of model that I would use for for the lower reaches of many of our river valley showing the relationship between the late Pleistocene gravels and the solid flexion deposits on the valley sides that the alluvium the Australian Louvin with intercalated pates and then the colluvium so again this is the sort of model that we have in our mind and we're thinking about these. And of course we need to think about the controls on the on these processes and things like tectonic movements sediment input and output sea level rise and fall and biogenic K alongside climate change are all important to consider when we're trying to interpret our sedimentary sequences. So what happens to the cause when they come back off the boat. The cause are recovered. They were taken to the university in Warwick, where we spent a long time in a very small room and dressed in white suits and masks and gloves, not very comfortable also under red light to cut the cause because we wanted to be able to use the cause for both sedating and paleo environmental and geological and DNA analysis so the cause of split in the red under red light half the core was wrapped in black plastic that went off to stored in in in Lampeter in the core store here that you can see. It was bought for the project and then OSL dating being done at St Andrews the other half of the core after splitting under red light was taken into the it will turn the lights on we were able to sample for DNA. The cause went back to Lampeter. We undertook the recording of photography and rapid assessment of the samples and rangefinder dating and I'll talk about the rapid assessment in a minute. That provided the information from primary deposit model and the litho stratigraphic environmental synthesis. That's the sort of level I'm talking about today. It then went the cause also went through primary assessments for pollen for diatoms and things. The analysis followed highlight high resolution radiocarbon dating. We've also done a geochemical core scanning which you'll hear about this afternoon, and then the final phase once everybody done whatever they wanted to do with the cause. They were chopped up for plant macrophosal beetle and mollusk analysis. And that there is still core material available at the core, the core store is still full of many of these sequences so we do retain the possibility of additional works which we didn't anticipate at the outset of this project so anybody's got any wacky ideas or interesting ideas to do with the cause then there may well be material out there for you. So we went to the core materials we looked at we would take samples through the major stratigraphic units, assess for the preservation of all sorts of material plant material ostrichods forums diatoms mollusks small mama remains, etc. So we got a quick look see as to what's there John Whitaker did this this is his work. He used the forums and the ostrichods divided into groups based on different environmental tolerances to characterize the deep positional environment of each of the major stratigraphic units. And here's his, his table here, we're also able to identify species present which might be cold climate things which might be warm climate things which might be reworked from the Pleistocene, etc. So here's health 19 stigraphy and this rapid assessment and the subdivision of that cause and then that information is used by the rest of the polyenvironmental team to decide where and what to sample. So, here we are, here's the Southern Valley I've divided into Valley mouth, the outer valley the inner valley and an inner basin and what I call the saddle here. These are the sort of main gym orthological parts of this valley and each area has its own relatively unique set of sequences. Here you can see the elevation the top of the cause not the bottom of the cause from the inner basin down to the valley mouth broadly declining as one might expect an elevation down valley sequence and oddity down here. I constructed a series of transects across across the valleys here show the profiles the modern day profiles of the valley. And so you can see here, here's the inner basin around about minus 26 meters here's the saddle and the inner valley here's getting the inner basin, and then we move down the system. And this in the valley mouth is approximately where Simon showed that seismic section briefly and I can see I'm running up against time. A few of the results this is the sequence of course across the valley mouth here in this sort of direction here and you can see on the, on the West side here cause very thin we're onto bedrock chalk interesting bedrock chalk outcropping very close to the surface down here. Across the rest of the area, we see cause that are dominated by sand fashies that are producing dates of between 80,000 and about 35,000 on a number of cause across this area. So putting these back in the Pleistocene in isotope stage four and three. So there's the correlation of those all showing the same fashies. Here's John's rapid microfossil assessment and you can see, these are outer estuarine environments. They've got cool and cold climate forums and forum species in here suggesting that these are cold climate things and here are the dates from 83 to 35,000 in here. There's also note over here. It says Azolla Azolla is a reworked plant remain that outcrops normally in marine isotope stage nine and 11 sequences so this is reworking in into the into these cold climate marine sequences showing that somewhere over here are exposed middle Pleistocene sediments. And we've got Holocene material on the top there. The cause that I've been talking about have been correlated with the brown bank formation or they may perhaps be dog a bank formation. This is the is a sea level curve for the last 120,000 years, and the isotope stages here. This is the outcrop of our sediments in this box here. These are the dates for those sediments. So they're occurring in as I say mainly an isotope stage three and going into isotope stage two. If those dates are correct. Then those deposits should be down here. So this suggests that at least in the valley mouth, we might be looking at some quite considerable uplift during the late Pleistocene early Holocene or some of these sediment sequences. Moving in and up the valley. We're now the last sequences I showed you are here we're now going into the outer valley. We have a series of cause running up to 31 a here where we have an outer estrange fascis forums and ostracods in here outer estrange going to brackish and returning to outer estrange suggesting perhaps some sort of marine temporary regression in the middle of this call here. But as we move up to 51 and 31. The marine fascis are replaced by tidal river fascis and freshwater fascis. So we think flooding starts here about 13 and a half thousand years ago. The flooding starts here marine flooding about 9000 years ago or 10,000 years ago sorry. And a similar sorts of dates here so we've got a package in the lower valley of the, the valley flooding by 13,000 years ago possible slight regression in here, we've got a tidal river running in this part of the valley until around about 10,000 years from freshwater to about 9.2,000 years ago so beginning to build up the picture of what's happening in the lower valley. As we move into the inner valley. There's a sudden shift and jump in elevation of the sequences and in the in the fascis so we see brackish mud flats now developing in this part we don't have any dates on this yet. Up to here we've got brackish conditions, starting around about 9,400 years ago in here, sat on top of a nice peach sequence that goes back to about 13 and a half thousand 13,000 years ago. And finally up here 34 this is on what I call the saddle which is up here, which is a sequence of Pete's that runs from about 14,000 years ago to about 9,000 years ago contains some really interesting pollen plus some interesting fish remains from from the base of the sequence here. And this is some sort of perched water table feature high high up relatively high up on the valley sides. So that's just showing that the sequence of all of those long profiles from the mouth over here up to the saddle in here. We've also got a sequence of course from this inner base and this is where the the tsunami core came from here in 01. Interestingly, in this part of the, the, the sequence we've got a lot more salt marsh we don't see much salt marsh told developed in the main part of the valley so so this basins working slightly differently. So going back to my original model here, which we use from Southern England. We can modify that in the red box is really where most of our course come from. And we see the late Pleist seeing gravels we see tidal freshwater river deposits, we see possibly basal Pete deposits in places. Estuarine alluvium and then subtitle flats, we're not seeing anything out towards the edge of the valley here. So, this is one of the areas we need to start looking in the future if we get an opportunity to go back. There are anomalies in this landscape and with the cause core 39 is anomalous. It looks from all intents and purposes as very similar to many of our sequences with freshwater river deposits cold climate forums ostracods rather in the base here going up into brackish marine deposits. The only problem with this core is it's down here. It's considerably lower in elevation than anything else. The dates suggest it's flooding from the freshwater into the brackish around about the same time as the flooding in parts of the inner valley. So, what's going on here is there's some sort of barrier that has has has prevented this flooding at an early date this you know we do we are dealing with tunnel valleys but something must have kept the water out the marine waters out from this. So we need to think about potential barriers in this landscape. So, in conclusion, this is the first time I think that an area in doggiland of a single value has been looked at in detail, mostly previously you know isolated cause have been looked at here we've targeted something in detail and this is unique. The valley systems are complex we've got perched water bog systems river valley estuary coastal embayment, all of which are enticing to mesolithic people. We've identified that there are subtle differences in patterns of sedimentation that occur in these landscapes. We have a lot of problems. Undoubtedly, there are this potential uplift in the valley mouth. We don't understand the valley mouth geomorphology fully yet. We've got issues of localised geomorphology at a scale, commensurate with that of thinking about the archaeology and particularly zoning the areas into the valley into areas of archaeological potentials. And we do have evidence of recycling of older material into younger sediments. The azolar is a very good example of that. What does the future hold. Well, the work we've done is a good start. We now need to look at cross valley profiles and the margins of sequences to see if we can find these more terrestrial deposits that I was talking about that we're missing. We need to better understand the mouth of the valley. It's interesting we've got chalk bedrock here because you know that's going to supply a source of raw material for tooling up for late Pleistocene and early Holocene humans. We need to think about the role of barriers, maybe beach barriers or other forms of barriers may control and may play in controlling patterns of sedimentation. And I also think we need to look at these smaller and potentially tributary barriers in which unique sequences may be preserved. So that's it. Thank you. And again, thank you to all the people who've collaborated with this and sorry if I've mangled your words and your interpretations. Very good. Thank you, Martin. Thank you again for keeping the time. We have one question in the chat box from John Adams. Is there evidence in the plant and tree life of human influence occupation crops, even to which if I may, I will amplify. Do you have any evidence in those calls of anthropogenic influence or even archaeological material? We don't have archaeological material in the cause. We've obviously not sieved everything because in order to genuinely rule that out, we'd have to, you know, sieve the whole core, but certainly in the cutting of the cause we haven't seen anything. In terms of the plants and the pollen, I will defer that question until you've listened to Ben after coffee because Ben's in a far better position to comment on that sort of thing with me. I think one of the things to point out is the majority of these cause are coming from situations where we might not expect to find certainly in situ evidence for human activity. The majority of the cause, you know, coming from intertidal and subtitle sand and mud flats are not going to be the places you'd necessarily expect it to find archaeology. Obviously the 34, which is a terrestrial deposits in what I would define as terrestrial. Again, it's a pretty wet marshy environment. So this is why I think we need to target the valley sides and really see if we can pick up some of these colluvial sequences and paleosols. It did surprise me, we didn't find any paleosols and any truly sort of dry land situations. So I'm not sure whether that answers the question fully or whether it's, but in part that answers your question. We have a comment that was added to the chat here by Ben Geary, who's giving a paper a little later who says that the next paper will touch on evidence for human impact or not. So stay tuned for that. We have one more question time for it from Chantal Connally. Do we know if any British rivers feed into this one, just thinking of the predominant riverine distribution of early metabolic sites and some of the patterns in East Anglia? I think Chantal, in this case, this river is entirely within Doggerland. The headwaters are probably somewhere in the vicinity of the inner basin. We don't quite know how, well I don't quite understand how the river relates to that. The rivers that might enter the coastal embayment to the southwest of where we're working might well drain parts of East Anglia, but not directly into the southern rivers that we've been looking at. It's entirely contained in Doggerland. Okay. Two questions have just been added. I think we can take them. Anthony Firth is asking one of them three questions. They're coming in thick and fast. Trevor Fulton asks about whether Doggerland was covered by an ice dam lake, and do you see lacustrine clay deposits from that? In all the causes we've got, there are no clearly lacustrine deposits. There are sediments that could have formed in the entry points to lakes, but we don't find fine grained lake deposits that are clearly lacustrine. I don't know is the answer to that, but that doesn't mean they're not there. It just means that our cause haven't sampled them. Okay, well that probably leads into the other two questions I've got here. Anthony Firth asks, are there indications of query extensive erosion in your sequences, which might have a bearing on understanding the present of archaeological material? Well, there are cut and fill sequences in the freshwater, sand and gravel sequences, yes. The tops of the peats might be eroded, but again, you know, I would come back to, I don't think we're in the cause of not being taken in the places where we're likely to see that sort of activity in a big way on the edge of, you know, on the dry land wetland interface where you might have expected archaeology to be in the first place and secondly, for it to be subsequently eroded. Okay, that sort of is followed up by this final question. The last one we'll take from Katrina Duel Anderson who says concerning the terrestrial deposits that you want to locate, what are the chances for their preservation in general? Good question, to which I'm not sure. We don't know, they're obviously going to be patchy, they're obviously going to be relatively thin and we haven't targeted any of the previous survey to look for them primarily because we didn't have the high resolution data that we now have. And of course, the coring program was set up earlier in the project. I would be surprised if there aren't places, particularly perhaps in some of these smaller streams feeding into the river valley where we don't get those sorts of situations, but ask me again in five years time if we've got funding and I might be able to answer that.