Page 81 - Manual for Activities directed at the Underwater Cultural Heritage

© The Institue of Archaeology and Antiquity, University of Birmingham. Geological data collected during preliminary work on the sediments of the North Sea, UK.
All preliminary study should start with desktop research that brings together all relevant data that has previously been collected.This can be historic data, geological and field data that has been collected for other purposes than the present purpose.
How informative the analysis
of the data collected for other purposes can be is shown in
this image of a succession of superimposed Pleistocene and early Holocene landscapes hidden in the sediments of the North Sea bottom. It was composed by a research group of Birmingham University that processed the shallow section of seismic data collected in the search for oil
and gas in far deeper layers
since the 1960s, using advanced 3D computing.This allowed to reveal the true morphology
of Quaternary features, highligthening a large river valley (600 m wide and 27.5 km long)
from an ancient landscape existing 10,000 to 7,000 years ago referred to as the Shotton River. From an archaeological perspective, questions naturally arise as to the possible climate, ancient settlements and migration patterns 10,000 to 7,000 years ago.
Virtual rending of the Mesolithic sites of the Shotton River based on geo-seismic data, North Sea, UK.
The University of Birmingham undertook a very ambitious project to visualise an otherwise inaccessible Mesolithic site of
the Shotton River withVirtual Reality (VR) technology, exploiting real geo-seismic data sources
of the southern North Sea and thus to reconstruct the ancient Shotton river valley discovered while gathering seismic data for petroleum in the North Sea.The virtual landscape reconstruction is populated with vegetation types based on pollen records of the same period in nearby region, and 3D models of Mesolithic dwellings have been grouped into villages and positioned near possible settlement areas.The finalVR environment has been “brought to life” via real-time interactive walkthroughs, complete with environmental and spatial sound effects.
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Preliminary work