The Remembered Land: Surviving Sea-level Rise after the Last Ice Age (Debates in Archaeology) - Softcover

Leary, Jim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1474245900 ISBN 13: 9781474245906

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015

Synopsis

How did small-scale societies in the past experience and respond to sea-level rise? What happened when their dwellings, hunting grounds and ancestral lands were lost under an advancing tide? This book asks these questions in relation to the hunter-gatherer inhabitants of a lost prehistoric land; a land that became entirely inundated and now lies beneath the North Sea. It seeks to understand how these people viewed and responded to their changing environment, suggesting that people were not struggling against nature, but simply getting on with life – with all its trials and hardships, satisfactions and pleasures, and with a multitude of choices available. At the same time, this loss of land – the loss of places and familiar locales where myths were created and identities formed – would have profoundly affected people's sense of being. This book moves beyond the static approach normally applied to environmental change in the past to capture its nuances. Through this, a richer and more complex story of past sea-level rise develops; a story that may just have resonance for us today.

About this title

About the Author

Jim Leary lectures in Archaeology at the University of Reading, UK. Formerly a prehistorian with English Heritage and the 2012 'Field Archaeologist in Residence' at Cambridge University, his publications include The Story of Silbury Hill (with David Field, 2010).

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1474245900
• ISBN 13: 9781474245906
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176