The Drowning Land was inspired by a Time Team TV special on Doggerland that I watched in 2007, but there’s a long road of research between a popular TV program and a novel based on actual science.
In the afterword to the novel (which you can read online at https://www.teuton.org/~stranger/TheDrowningLand-Afterword) I discuss some of that science, and how it shaped my story; here, I’d like to talk about how I did that research, rather than what I found.
My research journey began, as I suppose it does for most authors these days, on google, reading about the basics of Mesolithic archaeology and history. I’m a very amateur armchair archaeologist at best — the closest I’ve come to formal training was a single elective year at university thirty years ago — so my first task was to bring my patchy knowledge up to date with the current state of general knowledge. Wikipedia, as ever, provided me with a fairly dense overview, but its biggest advantage was in the references. As a novice in a field, who doesn’t know what the seminal texts might be, the references on a good Wikipedia article are the way to go.
The Wikipedia articles on Doggerland pointed me in the direction of Dr. Vincent Gaffney, and the ERC Europe’s Lost Frontier’s Project (formerly The North Sea Palaeolandscapes Project), which set out to map the ancient landscape using data collected by oil exploration companies (primarily BP, and the British Geological Survey). Lost Frontiers has compiled a series of reconstructed seafloor maps representing different periods of prehistory which I drew on heavily for the book.
Investigating the work of Lost Frontiers also pointed me in the direction of other academic projects focussing on the Mesolithic around the North Sea. This includes the Zandmotor project in the Netherlands (collecting artefacts dredged up in the construction of a new raised dyke), and digs (with exhibitions) in Jersey.
Jersey, as it happens, is where I like to take my holidays, and it’s also a remnant of Doggerland’s southern parts. On my summer holiday, I visited the exhibition, and wrote down the names of everyone involved, then reached out to them. Scientists, contrary to 1950’s movie representations, are humans too, and they love to be contacted about their work.
One of the people who responded was Dr. Chantal Conneller, who was working on a dig at Les Varines, a Magdalenian site that has produced remains of Neanderthal hunters. Dr Conneller shared some of her papers with me (which had the added benefit of putting me on a mailing list for other research publications) and invited me to visit her dig the following summer. Her research gave me precious insights into the culture of Doggerland, and — when I went back to Jersey the next summer — I was able to handle some of the artefacts they were excavating. She also told me about work that Dr. James Dilley, an expert in prehistoric reconstructions, was doing in concert with the Ice Age work on the island, showing members of the public how to knap flint, make cordage, mix pine-sap glue, and a dozen other things that my characters would have done every day.
I sought out Dr. Dilley and was able to examine a number of his reconstructions (which naturally made it into the book), as well as get some cord and glue making lessons. Later, my wife and I spent a wonderful summer evening around a fire as James taught us the basics of flintknapping. Later, he helped me with some of the crafting scenes, by reading them over and pointing out my errors. If you want to benefit from his skills yourself, his website, Ancientcraft, now has a YouTube channel where you can learn all about flintknapping. Having an artefact like my own (really bad) flint blade in hand as you write, can help you connect with history.
Each contact here led to more, and to more avenues of research. As well as their own papers, the scientists I spoke to in Jersey directed me towards other publications, and other researchers, including Dr. Bryony Coles (who coined the name Doggerland), and Dr. Vincent Gaffney, who we met up above in connection with Lost Frontiers, and who proved just as obliging when I got in touch (not to mention snapping up one of the first copies of the book).
A few things I needed to research were outside the subject areas of these archaeologists, such as period foraging, plant life, and language. For the former, I was able to call on the help of old family friend Dr. David Chamberlain at the Royal Botanics of Edinburgh, who, like every other scientist involved in this book, was eager to talk about their expertise. For the latter, I had to go out on more of a limb.
No one knows what language the people of Mesolithic Europe spoke. Indeed, their whole family of languages (now called Old European) were replaced — still in prehistory — with the Proto Indo-European that eventually became the vast majority of modern European languages. I’m a writer, not a linguist (other than a required year of English Language in first year uni), and I couldn’t really grasp the complexities of Glottochronology, but I did want to have some words in the book that might have come from that era.
To do this, I tried my own bit of historical linguistics. I got my hands on some dictionaries for Cornish, Breton, and Manx — three languages thought to be related to Old European — and looked for words that were similar between all three, which might point towards their more ancient ancestor and then used a few of them in the book. I’m sure they are no more accurate to real Old European than if I’d simply made them up, and my readers would be none the wiser if I had, but I know that there’s a little more to them, and that works for me.
To summarise this rambling dash through my multiple years of research: start with academic overviews of the subject in question (possibly on Wikipedia), and follow their references. Once you’ve read enough into the subject that you are confident you have the basics right, get in touch with the experts directly, you’ll be surprised how willing they are to help, and if there’s an opportunity to do something hands-on, take it, it will make all the difference.
Recommended Article: The Drowning Land – a Review
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