JIM LEARY PERCEPTIONS OF AND RESPONSES TO THE HOLOCENE FLOODING OF THE NORTH SEA LOWLANDS Summary. This paper explores how the drastic landscape changes that took place in the North Sea basin during the Holocene affected the lives of those dwelling in that area. Previous contributions to the discussion of the Holocene inundation of the North Sea have tended to concentrate on the timings. This paper discusses the ways people could have perceived and responded to these events, emphasizing that climate change should not be viewed apart from social factors. It is also argued that sea-level rise was not something externally imposed on communities but an integral part of their world. introduction At the end of the last glaciation, about 10,000 years cal BC, sea-levels began to rise rapidly causing the North Sea to flood the low-lying plain to its south, whilst the Atlantic coastline advanced east along the Channel River to form what is now known in Britain as the English Channel. These two bodies of water eventually linked sometime before 4000 cal BC, cutting Britain off from the Continent and making it an island. The chalk ridge between Dover and Calais would not have posed an obstacle to these two bodies of water at this time since a gap had already been created between 450,000 and 180,000 years ago during an earlier interglacial (Gupta et al. 2007), allowing water to flow freely from the North Sea to the English Channel through what became the Dover Strait. As the coastline receded during the years between 10,000 and 4000 cal BC, the sea inundated a landscape occupied by hunters and gatherers (Coles 1998; 1999; 2000). As lower-lying areas flooded first, islands of higher land would have been left, some of which may have been relatively small, and perhaps linked to larger ones at low tide. These islands would have gradually become smaller before eventually being swallowed by the waters altogether. A range of radiocarbon dates taken from peat deposits in the southern North Sea indicate that salt water conditions existed in some areas from 6050 cal BC, with fully marine conditions probably by about 4550 cal BC; the Dogger Bank, the highest known area in the North Sea and therefore one that would have remained an island the longest, was likely to have been entirely submerged by 4050 cal BC (Ward et al. 2006, 214). More recently Behre (2007) has refined the sea-level curve based on new dates obtained along the German coast, and suggests that its rise was very rapid in the early Holocene, estimated at 1.25 cm per year (Behre 2007, 85). Taking a single generation as 25 years, this would be equal to a rise of 31.25 cm per generation. OXFORD JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY 28(3) 227–237 2009 © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA. 227