Case Studies:Case study 12

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Holocene Coastal Change at Northumberland
Boomer et al.'s (2007) paper relates the importance of UK coastal settings as focii of human occupation during the Holocene on the Northumberland coast in northern Britain. The landscape at the Howick site has well preserved remains from the Mesolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age and Romano-British periods. The valley of Howick Burn to the south of the Mesolithic site occupies a small part of the 30 to 50m wide flood plain and earlier courses would have provided freshwater to the settlements. Environmental evidence from the river valley was obtained by augering and recorded local and regional environmental change in the form of plant microfossils, shells and sediments. The changing organic content was recorded by the Loss-on-Ignition technique. The plant macrofossils provided radiocarbon dates.

Calcareous microfossil assemblages have been recovered from the fine-grained sediments, recording a change from marine through to brackish and eventually freshwater conditions between about 8200 and 6500BP. A pollen study showed indicated vegetation change from grassland in the lateglacial to Holocene and hazel and alder dominating in the mid-Holocene. Radiocarbon dating and sedimentological evidence indicates a major hiatus between approximately 11000 and 8000 years BP (including the period of Mesolithic occupation), represented by a 30 cm ‘chaotic’ coarse clastic unit within the otherwise uniform fine grained sequence. The layer of poorly sorted coarse sands and sandstone pebbles is largely derived from the local country rock, which is exposed on the foreshore today but is not exposed in the river valley today. It is probably the result of a significant high-energy event dated to about 8300 cal. BP. The age and context suggests that this may be associated with the Storegga Slide event, already well-documented along the eastern coast of Scotland.

The full article is Boomer, I., C. Waddington, T. Stevenson and D. Hamilton (2007) Holocene coastal change and geoarchaeology at Howick, Northumberland, UK The Holocene 17, (1) 89-104. This can be found at http://hol.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/17/1/89

Keywords: Holocene, Northumberland, coastal change, tsunami deposit

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