3. Luc

Luc Amkreutz is Curator of Prehistory Collections at Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden. Luc specializes in Mesolithic and Neolithic archaeology, with a focus on mankind and material culture in relation to climate change. He played in a leading role in shaping the touring exhibition Doggerland: Lost World in the North Sea, and editing it’s accompanying publication which was recently shortlisted for the annual EEA Book Prize by the European Association of Archaeologists.

Luc and I met in his office and made our way over to the high security, climate-controlled environment of the museum stores on Wednesday 29th March 2023.

Luc - One point I always try to make, and often in lectures or talks I give and in research too, is that it’s very modern for us to think in terms of catastrophe, and of land disappearing, and things like the Storegga slide which was the huge tsunami which happened at the end of Doggerland – those are catastrophic events, but people were confronted on a daily basis with a changing landscape, at least on the level of generations. So I make the comparison that, you know, the place where your grandparents had their base camp might in your lifetime only be a place where you can go fishing or land a canoe.

Matt - That’s exactly the kind of place where I have been, tracing farmhouses on maps and in stories from my grandparents that have fallen into the sea.

L

Absolutely. I think this dynamic landscape presents, most of the time, sort of a way of life, and it meant that sometimes you would have to make something of that where new opportunities were created as well. So I think we should frame that basically as a very positive thing. Also because it is dynamic in a wetland environment, which is one of the richest environments for hunter-gatherers to be in. Basically it’s really interesting that right now we sort of see every change as a potential threat – obviously climate change which is heavily man-induced these days, we feel confronted by a lot of challenge in the near future, and It’s not like we can go back to that distant past, but we can learn something from it in the sense that we could live our lives more in balance with the environment that we inhabit, and these changes wouldn’t be so much of a threat. That’s really an important lesson that Doggerland offers us is that we were, for a long span of time, very successful communities living in very dynamic environments.

M

It's that reframing that might make for positivity, the vocabulary around the time we find ourselves in can easily create barriers – the more and more we use the word ‘crisis’ the more hopeless people feel.

View fullsize

from the book ‘Doggerland: Lost World under the North Sea’, 2022

L

We were thinking about this when we produced the Doggerland exhibition because as a museum we’ve been involved in researching these artifacts from Doggerland since the 1960s, and from this also came the new research as more finds were washing up on the beaches et cetera, and that led to a working group which Hans is now taking care of, so there’s a lot of legacy. But in the exhibition, we place people in that landscape and focus on the full period, and what I found particularly important was that with a lot of people you are telling them what life was like over a period of a million years, which saw multiple ice ages, saw the environment change, and I really wanted bring home that what we are witnessing right now is not that same natural change. There is that side to it, that I want to make clear is that the changes we are seeing now are mainly induced by us and our levels of carbon emissions, but that there is a lesson to be learned from the past, of people living more in harmony and in balance with their environment. And that is also a lesson to take home with you and maybe try and integrate into your own life. So there is a sense of ‘okay – climate change is something that goes on’ and has happened all of the time, all the way through to right now but right now it is clearly linked to our activity as humans, but within humans we can also find part of the solution. One of the last artifacts we ended the exhibition with – we had this framed as the last piece which is an article with the heading ‘Greenland ice has never melted as hard as in the last half century’, so to really bring home that – okay, what you witness over a million years of landscape and climate change – you are a part of this as well. I think that that is an important message. And then within Doggerland, you can find so many places and environments and objects and stories that highlight different angles of what life has been like. So many different directions. This is what I think you will grasp from the exhibit when you visit tomorrow. It takes you on a journey of this 1 million years of life, of occupation of Doggerland, and it ends with the sea returning around 8000 years ago and then the fact that we are witnessing climate change here once again. That’s an important part of what makes it make sense, there is this narrative to it that is very much of the here and now. And the other successful things I think are that Doggerland is this kind of lost world beneath the North Sea… we need things to think with, and something that is not there anymore provides the ideal canvas to project onto.

M

Absolutely. There’s a literary kind of lineage of the lost world, of Atlantis, which is a really key kind of hook isn’t it, it’s really tangible.

L

Yeah and it’s right in front of your nose – it’s there when you visit the beach, you find those reminders. I’m from the other part of the country and I never really liked the Dutch beach because it’s kind of boring, and already at the other side of the North Sea I find much more interesting with coves and cliffs, and forests… but once it dawned on me that on the beach you can find the relics of this lost world which is right in front of you, that made it a lot more intriguing. And I think that’s also an important thing – I noticed that, and I don’t have any quantification of it – but there’s a lot of more people that know now about this lost world, and it does ring a bell now, which makes it quite powerful. So this lost world idea is another factor that makes it an attractive topic.  

What we did is that we really foregrounded the role of citizen scientists, because a lot of the information and from the objects we have are from those people that are walking along the beach – amateur archaeologists – they are the main contributors of very important discoveries.

M

I think that kind of spirit of collecting and the archetype of the collector is something to work with – years ago a lot of my research revolved around adopting the role of collectors in different settings and positions, and that extension of those very human ‘have and hold’ behaviours is quite powerful in this context – it reinforces the immediacy of what is there and what is right in front of us. If public engagement is a priority here then what better place to begin – this mine of information… recently – and I don’t think I’d really embraced this enough actually in the past – I’ve come to feeling like everybody in the villages around me – almost everyone is a historian. Maybe we just don’t talk to people enough, to one another, but when I do it is surprising and it really shouldn’t be, that we each hold our own set of keys to unlocking those fragments of a collective memory, of a landscape and a time and place.

L

And I think making those connections, like we have here maybe could give you a sense of belonging, and sometimes I do think also, talking about landscape, there are differences there because I guess on your side of the channel as opposed to where I’m from, the land is old. Whereas here, this is land that was pumped dry, so that is not that old – if you walk into the landscape around Leiden here it is 300, 400 years old. There is nothing going back deeper into time. Which creates a different kind of history for people because less links to the landscape and ancient monuments and more to, I think, written history, in a landscape that’s totally artificial and manmade. Which does, you know, lead to a different kind of anchoring and of mentality. I find it really interesting and I haven’t really delved into it yet, but I’m from the Pleistocene part of the country! And there, you can find burial mounds, and the north you can find hand axes from Neanderthals. Here, at least you can’t find it on the surface and it’s too deep down to get to, and the land that you see is very straightforward, it’s like the surface of a pool table. Divided by ditches with water. You know, a very rectangular, angular kind of landscape. Landscape does things to people and makes you think about things around you in certain ways.

M

I feel like on the East Coast of the UK there is at least a type of understanding that ‘this will go’ – that ‘this is going’ – and it’s in some ways accepted that we’re walking around on something pretty fragile, particularly that patch of boulder clay where I grew up, and in others, day-to-day, much less so, but it’s also really politically contentious… Deeper than that it’s difficult to describe but I do feel this certain mentality around this subject. I went to an event marking the anniversary of the Great Floods in 1953 at a local village hall recently, a community centre, which chopped away quite a bit at the Holderness coastline but not anywhere near as dramatic as elsewhere on the coast or how it unfolded where we are here, but I said to someone, “What do you make all of all this – what do you think?”, and he just said, “Well, it will just happen again won’t it. There’s nothing to stop it.”

L

There is also this tension between the west coast and the east where you have these cliffs and complete villages gradually breaking away, and then underneath the cliffs you have these really old Cromerian layers being exposed where you find, you know, the most ancient occupation in Europe. So there’s an interesting tension – of course than is early hominids, not modern humans, but still, also in a very different environment which is not there anymore.

M

Recently I was talking to a drainage expert who was telling me how he had worked with a sand and gravel extraction company in an advisory capacity around exploratory digging in this village and they hit what they found to be an ice sheet further down that had generally been explored there, and they were surprised to find it contained tropical shells, species that you might find in the Caribbean today, which is just such a huge contrast to what you find in the present day on the surface of the clay, because there’s all of this glacial till and you kind of position the history within that, like this is a postglacial, subarctic landscape, but then just beneath your feet you’re walking on this tropical shell bed. What I find really interesting about this landscape here, and that at home, and in-between like we were saying, Doggerland - is that it feels like quite an intimate microcosm of rapid change on a daily basis. But when things accelerate then how do we adapt – and that is where we all are.

L

One of the most powerful things I do when I give a talk is that one of the most common shells you find here at the beach are these familiar white shells but they are actually from a species which has long been extinct, so if you pick them up they are in fact always about 100,000 years old, and they date to the last time the sea was further inland here and the conditions were warmer. There were hippopotamus swimming in the rivers and water buffalo in the grass and that was before the last ice age, so people pick up pieces of climate change and are holding that in their hands, and this makes it a very tangible thing. In one of the first displays in the exhibition you can touch one of these shells and learn a bit about the fact that Doggerland and these old landscapes are all around us, and it has a story to tell. 

There are so many fascinating stories. A couple of years ago I went along on a fishing boat on an exhibition to look for fossils but then when you see the stuff actually coming up in these crates and holding them in your hands, it is so powerful. The tangible aspect of floating in a boat above the bottom of the sea and then seeing ice age fauna coming up and being able to touch it… and also the idea, which I never really realised, that it is not that deep. Where I am from in Limburg, the highest point is not even that high but it’s 300 metres – the highest point in the Netherlands – that’s far higher than the deepest point between the Netherlands and the UK, which is about 40 metres or something. Somebody told me that these higher areas like Brown Bank and Dogger Bank – on a clear day, with easy water, you can actually see the bottom, and I thought, you know, sea is deep. What is going on here is this whole land reclamation, where actually Doggerland is spread onto the beaches, but also – and this is really interesting – a tension between the fact this is why we can find it but at the same time complete ecological environments and intact sites, our heritage is sucked up, thrown through a mesh, cut up into pieces and sprayed onto on a beach. So this is another aspect, this is a very commercial area of the North Sea where nature has a bit of a foothold for a couple of decades now, but archaeology and our heritage is suffering, especially if it’s not a shipwreck, it’s a very difficult thing to protect, especially we don’t really know where it’s at all of the time.

To give you an idea of the tension, two of the most important finds were our first Neanderthal as well as a whole 33 hand axes which were sucked up with gravel in front of the coast of Norfolk, found by amateurs in boats who are not allowed to further investigate the spoil heaps on these wharfs because the industry is afraid that their concessions in the North Sea might be taken away from them for a couple of years. So there’s a huge tension between economic influence, which is massive, and the way in which we acquire knowledge. This is something you could also play with, you know these cores – these vertical  representations of what is in fact a horizontal landscape – here in this image you see one area drowning, you see sea shells coming in, and then you have the sand above it… this is something where I put in a lot work is that you see lots of maps in all of these geological journals and people don’t pick up on that, so what we tried to do is to translate that to what you see on the news with the weather report. So this is you know, the first humans, about a million years ago, that’s that kind of landscape with a very broad land bridge, and then you have very severe ice ages where for a brief moment in time these ice caps lock, and a huge inland lake appears, and you have also a huge waterfall appearing which created the White Cliffs of Dover and Calais… that is just mind blowing as well, because, you know, this is a huge ice age lake and you see this little stream here? Well these are the White Cliffs of Dover. What happened was the lake filled over across two ice ages and actually cut through the chalk wall there. So you came here by boat, but the channel, or the trajectory has been placed in a different route because the original trajectory was planned alongside the place where this waterfall ended up on the North Sea floor, and on the North Sea floor there are pits that are 40 metres deep, with loose gravel in them, because of the enormous pressure of the waterfall. So our modern wayfinding is determined by happened in those severe ice ages.

So this period is also where the sea shells are from, the coast was much further inland – it was warm, this is where you would find those familiar ice age megafauna, and this is mostly what ice age Europe looked like: huge rivers, which eventually lead out into the Atlantic Ocean. After the last ice age you see this landscape, which is huge at the beginning, the sea reclaiming this more and more, and eventually it drowns. The higher areas become islands, and then the connection with Britain here is severed.

M

Some of these stories are pretty incredible. Thinking about education and childhood, in the UK at least it seems like, at least my experience of studying and of teaching, is that really the national curriculum doesn’t often get into pre-history at all, possibly in art you might learn the obligatory bit about cave paintings for like a month, it’s so narrow, but there is so much bound up within this that is actually about the future, and its really tangible history in the ways you described, I always felt like there was something missing there and at the moment there is actually quite a concerning undercurrent of political bias and weighting – not as dramatic as that in the US, but there is still that sort of interference happening.

L

Exactly – like, everything begins with the Romans. Another powerful thing is these footsteps – these here were some of the first people in Europe and there is really nothing quite as human to make, and then they end up all the way north, you know, in an early iteration of the River Thames. You will see a cast of these in the exhibition, but they were originally in the British Museum, where they had an art installation dealing with these footsteps and were connecting that to migration, which you can easily do you know taking a modern prescient theme and connecting it so directly to our past, you know – making people aware that we are all migrants.

This is our own Neanderthal piece from the North Sea with a small hole here because he had a subcutaneous tumour, so he also has a bump on his head in the reconstruction. These Neanderthals had been a species longer in Europe than we have, you know it’s questionable whether we will make it that long. This little flint knife is another hugely important discovery, it has some bark tar attached to it, and we dated it, it came back 50,000 years old, and that says something actually about very complex technology that Neanderthals had. This materials from Doggerland is yielding important answers to questions we have – and how smart people were. This is the skull cap here of the oldest modern human found near the Netherlands.

M

We have some preconceptions about what technology is and what it means right – we’re always contemporary with the ‘most advanced’ technology wherever we are in time, and we might feel like that means technology is always improving or is better or more stable now than it ever has been, but how true is that?

L

Absolutely, and why do find ourselves as modern humans more important, or do we think we are more important than other species, and what this also tells us is that the common idea is that high-end technology arises when people live in one place in close proximity and there are lots people there together, whereas this technology we are looking at was thought of at the edge of ice age Europe, where people were living in very small communities, so it’s extraordinary. We tried to translate these bits and pieces to visualisations, working with an archaeological artist and usually what you see in illustrations like this of the end of the last ice age, you have these images of people and they’re always hunting, they’re always looking for food, and here we positioned them doing a ritual performance – and we don’t know this, but it does help you change the perspective you have.

illustrations by Kevin Wilson, from the book ‘Doggerland: Lost World under the North Sea’, 2022

M

Yes – a different perspective around the reverence we have to objects, the things we make, the things we find, different values of different resources… I was talking with Annelou about this just this morning, this is an entirely different mode of living to the throwaway culture we are now absorbed in.

L

Yes and I mean you look at the decoration on these objects and tools as well, well with these V-shaped chevron type patterns I think there are only six comparable items we have from this period, 13,000 years ago, but we have one in Poland, one in Denmark, this one from the North Sea, there is one from a cave in Wales, so this says something about connection, because people expressed themselves in similar ways across vast distances, which is also so telling of what these communities were like.

Of course you have so many different sorts of animal as well – and people think through animals. If you can use either a Mammoth or a Woolly Rhinoceros or maybe in the Holocene an Aurochs, or an Elk, that immediately brings people into a different timeframe.

We have such strange things too – we have almost 2000 of these bone and antler arrowheads and spear points, and then we discovered that some are made of human bone. Most are made of red deer, but some human bone too in an environment where there is a lot of wildlife, so you didn’t necessarily need human bone for an arrowhead, so what does this mean? Maybe these ones weren’t used but they were carried along, maybe these arrowheads meant something different if they were carved in a certain way.

The coastal areas which are disappearing are those were life was richest, and a lot of these are lost now. What I found very compelling was the study of the Aboriginals, from not that long ago, where they talk about these ancient landscapes and they say that you could hunt kangaroo or emu there, and then when you calculate back when, where they are pointing at, which is sea but was land and that is 9000 or 10,000 years ago, the same time as Doggerland was drowning… we, in our modern society, we don’t know this anymore. We think of the land around us as being static, as fixed, as ‘finished’, and through their stories, they know that the world had been different, and I think that gives you a much more balanced perspective of living in the world, and that’s something we have lost.

Storytelling is a really important aspect, and particularly here working in a museum, I find it so interesting to think about what the science tells us about where and who we are now, and how are we experiencing time.

M

Is this a period of time that’s always interested you?

L

In terms of being an archaeologist, when I was young, you know where I’m from we have a neolithic flint mine, and neanderthal stuff on the surface, and I always took home rocks I found in the fields and made little museum displays in my room. I was always interested in history and I kind of lost that in high school, but found it again later on. I did a year of law school and then made the switch, and so that’s where that came from I think – living in a landscape where this is all tangible. I’ve been working here at the museum for 15 years, and the first object I was giving when I started working here was one of these bone points, and I knew that my predecessors also had documented these finds… I’ve seen it change because in their time, they documented finds but they also had this idea that - okay, we know it’s from the North Sea, we know that there was land, we know this partially explains how things look similar in the UK and here, but it’s by and large an area we can’t research – and this also made it just a sort of land bridge, a basic connection, and that changed, I think mainly because of some important work done and articles written by Briony Coles on Doggerland, where she used that as a name for the first time. I think that’s also important actually – if you give things a name, then they start living. It gradually changed from just being a connecting piece to an inhabited area and in fact from an inhabited area to what was likely the heart of Europe – the richest area, and that combined with new research techniques such as DNA and isotope analysis, and having these huge beach reinforcing projects and so a lot of people started finding stuff, really boosted this research. So I became caught up in that wave, and I played my part.

Public interest is growing and new and unexpected things are coming out of this as well. One of the most important find categories from Doggerland is human bone - maybe Annelou told you – that this area of preservation for organic artifacts and for human and animal bone, for these time periods in all of Europe, we have very little to go on, but we now have nearly 200 pieces of Mesolithic skeletal material, and a new research technique also telling us something about who these people were. So two weeks ago there was this huge paper in Nature, and it was on the genome of postglacial inhabitants all over Europe, and just a very small part of it was on this Doggerland population, because we contributed a couple of specimens as well. One important thing coming out of it for us was that – similar to the Cheddar Man discovery and in Luxembourg and Denmark, that people living there had dark skin and blue eyes – so in the newspaper, of course, that became the main take-away from the article and it was on the first page in the national newspaper. And it says ‘ancient dutchmen dark with light eyes’, and of course again created a lot of – you know, people being angry, which also happened with Cheddar Man, but also in the sense that ‘yeah, we know this’ in a good way, but there is definitely a lot of sentiment in society which finds this difficult, that it’s not what we thought, that we had white ancestors living here for aeons. There is something there coming out of it even to these satirical drawings and caricatures, and you know we have this big party in the Netherlands which is afraid that the white population is being replaced by migrants – this guy made this cartoon here with ‘these dark-skinned hunter-gathers warning us for the white farmers that are coming in’ – and that’s where I think: okay, the prehistoric past does have such an important role to play in the way people think about who they are, and where they came from. And that’s another thing to come out of Doggerland which is a very small research angle but it says something about who we were, about migration…

M

And how we feel about our identity in the present, wrapped up in the complex of recency.

L

Totally and it’s also like, which path do you choose because – and this is a completely different example – we have this huge nature-wildlife area on the opposite site of Amsterdam, and it’s was originally designed as a place where migratory birds could land, which was very successful, but then they wanted to make it an original landscape – it’s a huge swath of land, and so they introduced old breed horses and aurochs and red deer, and because it’s not a natural system, they need to cull these populations sometimes because otherwise these animals starve. So you get these huge discussions whether we should shoot them or let them starve or whether we should eat them, which makes it not a ‘natural’ environment anymore – all because we want to recreate something which isn’t there anymore, because you know they can’t migrate further – it’s a huge area, but it’s confined to the Netherlands so what kind of original path are we harking back to and how logical is that to do?

M

A couple of days ago I skimmed something, I haven’t read about it yet but – and this is another world – but there is a company somewhere working to create a ‘mammoth meatball’?!

L

Yes I was talking to someone about this like half an hour ago! They asked “would you try it?” and I don’t know but there is this whole thing obviously around trying to bring back mammoths – their landscape, their environments simply don’t exist anymore, so what would be doing to an animal like that – this is like a different question about artificially recreating meat, but it’s weird how we hark back to the past for these experiences, and you know it makes us think about ourselves. 

Doggerland has been used politically as well, to talk about Brexit, you know like ‘the first Brexit’.

M

That’s something in the back of my mind as well, this sort of drama around ideas about nation states and – again – fixity, recency, ancestry - folding back into a literal ‘breaking away from the continent’. But on a deeper level I guess stretching all the way back to this time period, and before then actually you’re still talking about two broad communities and communication and exchange across great distances in Europe – there is a lineage of that interaction which Brexit is now written into.

L

But also once the North Sea is there we tend to think of it as a barrier, whereas on the other hand you see that it is actually a conductor for interaction.