Taken at the Flood: ensuring sustainable heritage strategies for green energy development in the North Sea

随着沿海国家采用清洁能源基础设施，海上风电场将在未来几十年大幅扩张。这些举措是对气候变化的一种受欢迎的回应，英国的目标是到2030年将海上风电装机容量翻两番，并为所有家庭供电。北海南部的开发规模和速度都是史无前例的，它对欧洲最大、保存最完好的史前景观道格兰的影响将是巨大的。在过去的二十年里，全球创新的英国研究已经开始揭示北海下广阔的史前景观，它在最后一次冰川之后因海平面上升而消失。Doggerland是第一个，也是唯一一个研究已经达到考古调查现在可行的位置的同类景观。然而，我们的知识仍然存在重大差距。虽然我们对道格兰的自然景观、河流、湖泊和山谷了解很多，但从北海近海地带还没有发现定居或原地活动的证据，我们对居住在那里的社区的了解也不比一个多世纪前我们学科的先驱们好多少。最终，除了不同的偶然性发现之外，西北欧最后一批狩猎采集者最重要的集结地是下落不明。因此，在国家或国际上是否存在足够的策展协议，以充分减轻开发对这一特殊国家资源的影响，是值得怀疑的。如果不立即采取行动，我们就有可能破坏或摧毁独特的和未记录的考古资源。此外，随着开发，探索这一极其丰富和独特的遗产的机会将受到严重限制或失去。学者、开发商和策展人必须共同努力，制定有助于绿色发展的缓解战略，并在失去探索狗狗的机会之前提供关键的文化信息。在陆地或浅水调查中使用的传统考古勘探手段不适用于较深的近海水域。然而，通过对道格兰进行广泛、详细的测绘，我们可以确定哪里存在可接近的史前陆地表面，哪里可能存在定居点或活动区，以及哪里可能成功地进行有针对性的考古勘探。最近的研究已经确定了两个这样的领域。第一个是潜艇的入海口，南河，在东英吉利海岸外，第二个是英国和比利时之间等距离的布朗浅滩。这两个遗址都与重大的史前发现有关，可以进行调查。利用高分辨率地球物理、自动车辆测量、高分辨率振动测量、抓取采样和地面疏浚，该项目将恢复考古、环境和沉积学数据，并为就地、深水考古定居提供第一个证据。这些信息在地震测绘所得的大量地貌数据的支持下，将用于生成模型，以确定最有可能提供定居证据的北海区域。在未来准入将受到限制的开发区内，将使用项目期间开发的数据向缓解活动通报情况，这些数据表明哪些地区是可进入的，哪些地区可能提供人类活动的证据。在可用的短时间内，该项目将为英国和欧洲的学者提供机会，通过该项目建立的网络与各国策展人和开发商合作。这一合作伙伴关系将传播从对布朗银行和南河的调查中获得的经验，并提供我们所需的证据，以了解和保护北海包含的特殊考古资源，并支持英国的国家绿色能源战略。

Offshore windfarms will expand significantly over the next decades as coastal nations adopt clean-energy infrastructures. Such initiatives are a welcome response to climate change, and the UK aims to quadruple offshore wind capacity and power all homes by 2030. The scale and rapidity of this development within the southern North Sea is unprecedented, and its impact on Europe's largest and best-preserved prehistoric landscape, Doggerland, will be substantial. Within the last twenty years, globally innovative, UK research has begun to reveal the vast prehistoric landscape beneath the North Sea that was lost to sea level rise after the last glacial. Doggerland is the first, and only landscape of its kind, where research has achieved the position that archaeological investigation is now feasible. There remain, however, significant gaps in our knowledge. Whilst we know much about the physical landscape of Doggerland, its rivers, lakes and valleys, no evidence for settlement or in situ activity is known from the offshore zone of the North Sea, and our understanding of the communities who lived there is little better than that of the pioneers of our discipline over a century ago. Ultimately, the most significant staging ground for the last hunter-gatherers of Northwest Europe is, outside of disparate chance finds, unaccounted for.Consequently, it is questionable whether adequate curatorial protocols exist nationally, or internationally, to fully mitigate the impact that development will have on this exceptional national resource. If immediate action is not taken, we risk damaging or destroying unique and unrecorded archaeological resources. Moreover, access to explore this incredibly rich and unique heritage will be significantly limited or lost following development. Academics, developers and curators must work together to devise mitigation strategies that assist green development and provide critical cultural information before the opportunity for exploration of Doggerland is lost. Conventional means of archaeological prospection used in terrestrial or shallow-water surveys are not viable for deeper offshore waters. However, extensive, detailed mapping of Doggerland allows us to determine where accessible prehistoric land surfaces exist, where settlement or activity areas may be located, and where targeted archaeological prospection may be carried out with success. Recent research has identified two such areas. The first is the estuary of the submarine, Southern River, off the East Anglian Coast, the second is the Brown Bank, equidistant between the UK and Belgium. Both of these sites are associated with significant prehistoric finds and are accessible to investigation. Using high-resolution geophysics, autonomous vehicle survey, high-resolution vibracoring, grab sampling, and surface dredging, the project will recover archaeological, environmental and sedimentological data, and provide the first evidence for in-situ, deep-water archaeological settlement. This information, supported by the extensive landscape data derived from seismic mapping, will be used to generate models identifying areas of the North Sea that have greatest potential to provide settlement evidence. Within development zones, where future access will be limited, mitigation activities will be informed using data, developed during the project, indicating areas that are both accessible and likely to provide evidence of human activity. In the short time available, the project will provide the opportunity for UK and European academics to work with national curators and developers through a network established by the project. This partnership will disseminate the experience gained from survey on the Brown Bank and Southern River and provide the evidence we require both to understand and protect the exceptional archaeological resource contained within the North Sea, and to support the UK's national green energy strategy.