Page 14 - ModernParadiseFLIPBOOKcomplete

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Scottish scientific instrument maker, invented a revolutionary steam engine which

burned coal as its fuel. Around the same time, Abraham Darby, a Quaker and owner
of an iron works in Shropshire, discovered how to make iron using coke (baked coal)
instead of charcoal. Between them, Watt and Darby triggered an industrial revolution
based on coal, iron and steam power. The rise of the Atlantic world and the industrial
revolution both show how geography shapes history, but history changes what the
geography means.

Cognitive Geographies

Morris’ formula implies that geography acts as the framework in which history
happens. But in the case of Doggerland, we see something highly unusual and even
paradoxical: geography itself changing as an identifiable event. True, the rise in sea-
levels of which the inundation was the most dramatic event, did not happen
overnight, but archaeologists believe the foraging people who lived through it must
have noticed dramatic changes. Sometimes slowly, sometimes terrifyingly quickly,
the sea claimed their ancestral hunting grounds, campsites and landmarks. There

must have been eyewitnesses, even though we obviously don’t know their names or
have any eyewitness accounts. This is prehistory, which is defined as pre-writing. All
we have is the hard evidence of the geological surveys and artefacts.

Yet this inundation was a big moment, both a spectacular and a defining change; it
made us offshore islanders. Barry Cunliffe argues that archaeologists have to go
beyond the material evidence and ask how the inundation would have appeared to
the hunter-gatherers who experienced it. This is apparently unanswerable.

But he applies an interdisciplinary concept called “Cognitive Geography”. I quote him
at length (from Barry Cunliffe Britain Begins 2012):

“How the early Britons perceived the lands in which they lived is impossible to say
with any degree of certainty. Until around 6,000 BC hunter-gatherers will have had

little conception of the major geomorphologic changes going on around them, but
thereafter the rate of inundation and the catastrophic effects of storm surges were on
such a scale that coastal communities, particularly those around the fast-expanding
North Sea, will have experienced irreversible changes within a lifetime. The sense of
the sea as a force for change and as an inundator would have become embedded
within folk memory.”