Vince Gaffney

University of Bradford | UB · School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences

A series of massive geophysical anomalies, located south of the Durrington Walls henge monument, were identified during fluxgate gradiometer survey undertaken by the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project (SHLP). Initially interpreted as dewponds, these data have been re-evaluated, along with information on similar features revealed by archaeological...

Doggerland was a landmass occupying an area currently covered by the North Sea until marine inundation took place during the mid-Holocene, ultimately separating the British landmass from the rest of Europe. The Storegga Event, which triggered a tsunami reflected in sediment deposits in the northern North Sea, northeast coastlines of the British Isl...

Around 8150 BP, the Storegga tsunami struck Northwest Europe. The size of this wave has led many to assume that it had a devastating impact upon contemporaneous Mesolithic communities, including the final inundation of Doggerland, the now submerged Mesolithic North Sea landscape. Here, the authors present the first evidence of the tsunami from the...

Heritage Science is an emerging domain which is inherently interdisciplinary, reaching from the arts and humanities to encompass practice from the sciences and engineering. Increasingly trends in digital technologies have influenced, and indeed transformed many aspects of the process and activities that are core to cultural heritage. The visual qua...

Europe’s Lost Frontiers was the largest directed archaeological research project undertaken in Europe to investigate the inundated landscapes of the Early Holocene North Sea – the area frequently referred to as ‘Doggerland’. Funded through a European Research Council Advanced Grant (project number 670518), the project ran from 2015 to 2021, and inv...

Talež, situated on the southern coast of the island of Vis, is the only large prehistoric enclosure there that has been subject to detailed study. The site was surveyed in 1994, and a sub-surface sampling programme was undertaken then as part of the Adriatic Islands Project. This exercise revealed an extended chronology for the site which may stret...

The Battle of Mantzikert had profound consequences for both Byzantine and Turkish history, yet the historical sources for this campaign contain significant gaps. This book presents the results of a project that seeks to demonstrate the important role computer simulation can play in the analysis of pre-modern military logistics. In AD 1071, the Byz...

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The value of artificial intelligence and machine learning applications for use in heritage research is increasingly appreciated. In specific areas, notably remote sensing, datasets have increased in extent and resolution to the point that manual interpretation is problematic and the availability of skilled interpreters to undertake such work is lim...

Development of the continental shelf has accelerated significantly as nations around the world seek to harness offshore renewable energy. Many areas marked for development align with submerged palaeolandscapes. Poorly understood and difficult to protect, these vulnerable, prehistoric landscapes provide specific challenges for heritage management. I...

The value of artificial intelligence and machine learning applications for use in heritage research is increasingly appreciated [1]. In specific areas, notably remote sensing, data sets have increased in extent and resolution to the point that manual interpretation is problematic and availability of skilled interpreters to undertake such work is li...

Development of the continental shelf has accelerated significantly as nations around the world seek to harness offshore renewable energy. Many areas marked for development align with submerged palaeolandscapes. Poorly understood and difficult to protect, these vulnerable, prehistoric landscapes provide specific challenges for heritage management. I...

The University of Bradford's Submerged Landscapes Research Centre, led by Professor Vince Gaffney, is about to embark on an ambitious, collaborative project to map the seabed in the Baltic and North Seas, funded by an ERC Synergy grant totalling €13 million. The University is one of four key partners in the project starting early next year that r...

Old photographs can be used with photogrammetric methods to reconstruct 3D models of past sites and monuments. Adding more recent data from laser-scanning allows building a 4D time-lapse record that can be enhanced further by incorporating 3D geophysical subsurface data, for example from Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) surveys. Such comprehensive...

Prior to the formation of the North Sea during the mid-Holocene, North-Western Europe was connected through the Doggerland landmass. Whilst it has been known for the past century that forests grew in Doggerland, it has not been clear how this environment compares to the surrounding European areas. Here, we reconstruct the palaeoecology of a river s...

For much of the second half of the 20th century, archaeological accounts of Doggerland either relegated the landscape of the southern North Sea to having simply been a land-bridge, important for what it connected rather than what it was, or worse, overlooked it altogether (Coles 1998). At best, those whose work hinted at the importance of this lost...

The northwest European continental shelf retains, arguably, the most comprehensive record of a late Quaternary and Holocene landscape in Europe. The landscape was extensively populated by prehistoric communities and may have been a core habitat during several periods of prehistory, but was finally and rapidly inundated during the Mesolithic as a co...

Designed as a pragmatic approach that anticipates change to cultural heritage, this chapter discusses responses that encompass records for tangible cultural heritage (monuments, sites and landscapes) and the narratives that see the impact upon them. The Curious Travellers project provides a mechanism for digitally documenting heritage sites that ha...

The subject area of the Europe's Lost Frontiers project, the submerged landscape of Doggerland, is inaccessible and the data by which we can understand it is complex and hard for the non-specialist to understand. To be able to present the project at public events, an Augmented Reality sandbox was constructed, which records the shape of sand in a bo...

Mass loss at specified temperatures has been used widely to determine amounts of organic matter and carbonate in sediment samples. The loss on ignition (LOI) method is cheap and simple, but is time-consuming and provides information only for specific, pre-determined temperatures. It also requires relatively large sample sizes and is destructive. Th...

– Comprehensive geophysical assessment of huge pits; ERT, GPR, mag and EM.– Novel approach to testing and interpreting pits via coring.– Largest pit circuit confirmed in both the Stonehenge landscape and the UK.

A personal review of archaeoastronomy and skyscapes

This is not the final version of the supplementary data files. Copy editing was undertaken on the digital files. To access the final supplementary files visit - https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue55/4/supp-text.html

This paper describes some results of the research undertaken over the Brown Bank area during recent (2018/2019) geoarchaeological surveys in the North Sea which included seismic imaging, shallow (vibro)coring and dredging. It examines the benefits of simultaneous high-resolution (0.5 – 1m) and ultra-high-resolution (10 – 20cm) seismic survey techni...

Assigning metagenomic reads to taxa presents significant challenges. Existing approaches address some issues, but are mostly limited to metabarcoding or optimized for microbial data. We present PIA (Phylogenetic Intersection Analysis): a taxonomic binner that works from standard BLAST output while mitigating key effects of incomplete databases. Ben...

Doggerland was a land mass occupying an area currently covered by the North Sea until marine inundation took place during the mid-Holocene, ultimately separating the British land mass from the rest of Europe. The Storegga Slide, which triggered a tsunami reflected in sediment deposits in the Northern North Sea, North East coastlines of the British...

The northern and western isles of Scotland have proved fertile ground for archaeological investigation over the last 100 years. However, the nature of the landscape with its rugged coastlines and irregular topography, together with rapid peat growth rates, make for challenging surveying. Commonly, an archaeological monument or series of monuments i...

This call for chapter abstracts follows the highly successful publication of our first edited book “Visual Heritage in the Digital Age”. Published by Springer’s Cultural Computing Series in 2013 this successful volume has also been paid-downloaded 25,000+ times. Springer Cultural Computing Series is now interested in publishing a second volume expl...

Since 2010 the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project (SHLP) has undertaken extensive archaeological prospection across much of the landscape surrounding Stonehenge. These remote sensing and geophysical surveys have revealed a significant number of new sites and landscape features whilst providing new information on many previously known monuments. T...

As this volume, the final monograph of the SPLASHCOS network, was being finalised, the European Research Council agreed to fund a major new project relating to the marine palaeolandscapes of the southern North Sea. Emerging from the earlier work of the North Sea Palaeolandscapes Project (NSPP), the Lost Frontiers project seeks to go beyond the maps...

Croatia has a unique geographical and historical position within Europe, bridging central and south-east Europe. From the Pannonian Plain to the southern Adriatic maritime landscape, interconnectedness flows through Croatia’s history. This dynamic past is increasingly being reflected upon by a new and exciting generation of Croatian scholars who ar...

11 CurrentWorldArChAeology Syria, attacked by Daesh. In these cases, media coverage generated a huge number of images to which we add from online sources. As more images come to light, we will incorporate the new data to further refine our 3D models. Our conservation ethic means that we do not infill gaps in the models with approximations of missin...

The title of this paper refers, obliquely, to Robin Osborne’s (1987) influential book on the Greek city and its countryside “Classical Landscape with Figures”. ' We start with this reference, in part because much of the content of this paper will refer to issues relating to the interpretation of archaeological land/cityscapes, but also because Osbo...

Abstract—The first recorded crowdsourcing activity was in 1714 [1], with intermittent public event occurrences up until the millennium when such activities become widespread, spanning multiple domains. Crowdsourcing, however, is relatively novel as a methodology within virtual environment studies, in archaeology, and within the heritage domains whe...

GG-TOP, the Gravity Gradient Technologies and Opportunities Programme is the starting point of our vision to open up a new window to the underworld based on gravity sensing. Gravity - the all-penetrating force holding the Universe together - promises an unprecedented and unobstructed view of the underground.

Submerged palaeolandscapes can contain pristine underwater heritage. Regular monitoring of these areas is essential to assess and mitigate threats from development including construction, mining, and commercial trawling. While bathymetry alone may be insufficient to detect submerged palaeolandscape features, it can nonetheless recognize previously...

Recently, the finding of 8,000 year old wheat DNA from submerged marine sediments (1) was challenged on the basis of a lack of signal of cytosine deamination relative to three other data sets generated from young samples of herbarium and museum specimens, and a 7,000 year old human skeleton preserved in a cave environment (2). The study used a new...

Bennett questions the rigor of the dating of our sample from which sedimentary ancient DNA was obtained and the reliability of the taxonomic identification of wheat. We present a further radiocarbon date from S308 that confirms the lateral consistency of the palaeosol age. The suggestion of taxonomic false positives in our data illustrates a misint...

The Mesolithic-to-Neolithic transition marked the time when a hunter-gatherer economy gave way to agriculture, coinciding with rising sea levels. Bouldnor Cliff, is a submarine archaeological site off the Isle of Wight in the United Kingdom that has a well-preserved Mesolithic paleosol dated to 8000 years before the present. We analyzed a core obta...

https://theconversation.com/ancient-britons-had-wheat-2000-years-before-they-had-farms-38012

Increasingly, conventional soil sampling procedures face restrictions because of their destructive character. Hence there is a growing interest in non-invasive techniques, on which proximal soil sensors are based. There is great interest in applying proximal soil sensing to improve the characterization of the buried heritage embedded in the soil la...

Decisions on settlement location in the face of climate change and coastal inundation may have resulted in success, survival or even catastrophic failure for early settlers in many parts of the world. In this study, we investigate various questions related to how individuals respond to a palaeoenvironmental simulation, on an interactive tabletop de...

The Geological Survey of the Netherlands is extending the 3D model of the Quaternary record as created for the onshore part of the country to the North Sea realm. Onshore, cores are the most important source of information. Offshore, seismic data are at least equally valuable. A recent pilot study has shown that 2D and 3D seismic data, originally c...

Archaeological research at Stonehenge (UK) is increasingly aimed at understanding the dynamic of the wider archaeological landscape. Through the application of state-of-the-art geophysical techniques, unprecedented insight is being gathered into the buried archaeological features of the area. However, applied survey techniques have rarely targeted...

The North Sea subsurface shows the marks of long-term tectonic subsidence. Much of it contains a thick record of glacial and interglacial deposits and landscapes, formed during multiple glacial cycles and the associated regressions and transgressions during the past two million years. At times of lower sea level than today, areas that are presently...

Unthinkable? New maps for old? No landscape archaeologist can avoid a love affair with maps and, as an archaeolo-gist who grew up in the shadows of W. G. Hoskins, Mick Aston, and Brian Roberts, there was little chance that I could elude such an infatuation. From hours bent over a hot Grant projector as a student in the 1970s through to the white-he...

Agent-based modelling and simulation of survival and settlement behaviour via interactive visualisation could potentially become a useful technique for generating new knowledge in those areas that sparse information, acquired through traditional methods, does not allow researchers to make informed decisions about past behaviour. This is particularl...

The Palace of Diocletian, now the old town of Split, is one of the most important structures for the study of late Roman palaces, imperial ceremonial and urban change in late antiquity. At the heart of this palatial complex is the Mausoleum of Diocletian/Split Cathedral; a transformation which neatly encapsulates the transition from imperial reside...

Digital technology and visualisation play an increasingly large role within the strategic framework of the Arts and Humanities. This is not in itself unexpected given the nature of research in these disciplines but the need to obtain and process large amounts of data, to gather this from disparate locations and then to link and disseminate this inf...

This chapter describes a Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping framework, guidelines and implementation of the internet mapping site for the cultural management of the Mundo Maya region. The challenges of bringing together an extremely large dataset derived from a variety of sources and across five Central American countries were significant....

Digital approaches to heritage and archaeology were in development since the 1980s and witnessed exponential growth throughout the 1990s. The successive decade saw the breadth and depth of digital technology being applied in heritage and archaeology, encompassing a more complete process in research and focusing on more practical methodologies. It i...

In this article we assess the abilities of a new electromagnetic (EM) system, the CMD Mini-Explorer, for prospecting of archaeological features in Ireland and the UK. The Mini-Explorer is an EM probe which is primarily aimed at the environmental/geological prospecting market for the detection of pipes and geology. It has long been evident from the...

The capacity to conceptualise and measure time is amongst the most important achievements of human societies, and the issue of when time was “created” by humankind is critical in understanding how society has developed. A pit alignment, recently excavated in Aberdeenshire (Scotland), provides an intriguing contribution to this debate. This structur...