MAPPING A VANISHED LANDSCAPE

On a September night in 1931, the British fishing vessel Colinda was sailing 25 miles off the Norfolk coast of England near the North Sea’s Leman and Ower Banks. Trawlers like Colinda operated by dragging nets across the sea floor, scooping up everything in their path––fish, shells, seaweed, or otherwise. As the crew hauled up their net from a depth of 120 feet, the boat’s skipper, Pilgrim Lockwood, noticed a large block of peat among the catch. As he smacked it with his shovel to break it up and toss it overboard, he hit something hard, which he later recalled sounded like striking metal. Upon examination, Lockwood noticed an unusual object embedded in the clump. It was 8.5 inches long, with a barbed edge, and appeared to resemble some sort of prehistoric harpoon carved from bone or antler. Its discovery would soon alter the field of European prehistory and open the doors to a vast now-submerged landscape hidden beneath the North Sea. After the last Ice Age ended, this became the heartland for generations of European hunter-gatherers before it disappeared under the sea 8,000 years ago. Today, this lost world is known as Doggerland.

Experts from the British Museum who examined the Colinda harpoon, as it came to be called, determined that it likely dated to the Mesolithic period (10,000–4000 B.C.), the era of the hunter-gathers who lived just before the advent of agriculture. Archaeologists wrestled with the question of how such an object had ended up more than 20 miles offshore at the bottom of the North Sea. It seemed unlikely that prehistoric mariners could have dropped it during a fishing expedition, given the limited long-distance seafaring capabilities they possessed at the time.

The scientific world was shocked the year following the artifact’s discovery when pollen analysis carried out on peat extracted from the Leman and Ower Banks