In recent years survey along our coastlines and beneath the shallow waters of the English Channel, North Sea and Cardigan Bay has revealed evidence for formerly dry lands that once existed where we now have seas. These are not the landscapes of Atlantis or Cantre’r Gwaelod but real places which were once home to early modern humans and Neandertals. Our surveys are beginning the map the river valleys, estuaries and uplands of these lost landscapes and occasionally recover the traces of these early ancestors. This talk will show how these landscapes are being pieced back together again both in Cardigan Bay and elsewhere around the British Isles.

A report of the meeting by Clive Barrett is available to download.

Speaker biography

Dr Bates career history covers a number of disciplines including archaeology, quaternary geology, engineering geology and environmental science. It is this multi-disciplinary profile that allows him to provide a unique approach to archaeology that manifests itself through teaching, research and contract work.

He was centrally involved in the discovery and excavation of the important Lower Palaeolithic site at Boxgrove in the 1980’s and this interest in the Quaternary history of Sussex has continued to the present day. Since the mid 1990’s there have been 3 threads to his career; teaching, research and contract archaeology. All three are currently run through the School of Archaeology, History and Anthropology at Lampeter.

The archaeology of submerged landscapes is an on-going area of interest and he is part of a team looking at submerged landscapes around the Bay of Firth and the Loch of Stenness in Orkney. Additionally he is project geoarchaeologist for the Ice Age Island project in Jersey and is leading a new multi-disciplinary research excavation at La Cotte de St.Brelade in Jersey. He is also working as project geoarchaeologist on a research project at Isimila in Tanzania and has also worked as a geoarchaeologist on projects in Turkey, Lebanon, Qatar and Iran.

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