The potential of the organic archive for environmental reconstruction: an assessment of selected borehole sediments from the Southern North Sea

Abstract

Prior to the inundation of the region, during the eustatic sea level rise of the early Holocene, the landscape of the North Sea basin would have presented early human settlers with a range of ecosystems, resources for food and shelter, as well as barriers that restricted their movement. Therefore, the application of appropriate environmental archaeological methodologies, that help to elucidate signals of both natural and anthropogenic landscape change, within a well constrained chronostratigraphic framework, will be integral to the development of any archaeological research framework for the North Sea (Bell and Walker 2005).