Dr David Smith, CAHA

Dr David Smith has been awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant, for the project ‘Europe’s Lost Frontiers’.

This research project, hosted by the University of Bradford’s Professor Vince Gaffney (formerly UoB) and awarded €2.5million, aims to reconstruct the ancient landscape of Doggerland, now hidden beneath the North Sea. Within this submerged landscape lies invaluable evidence of the lifestyles of the humans that lived there from about 10,000 BC, until it was flooded at the end of the last ice age around 7,500 years ago.

The project brings together archaeologists, molecular biologists and computer scientists and includes researchers from the universities of Bradford, Birmingham, Warwick, St Andrews, Wales Trinity St David and Nottingham. The team has already used seismic reflection data to create the first maps showing rivers, lakes, hills and coastlines relating to human occupation.

Dr Smith, a specialist in wetland archaeology and Holocene landscape change, will bring his valuable expertise to the project by supervising the environmental analysis programme. He has been awarded £77,119 for his part in the five-year project, starting in December 2017 and finishing in November 2020 (the main project began in October 2015).