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2002 Strategic Environmental Assessment SEA3 Technical report - Archaeology (North Sea)

Publisher
British Geological Survey (BGS)
Updated
15 March 2024
Topic
Not set

Summary

This report is a contribution to the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA3) conducted by the Department of Trade and Industry (now Department of Energy and Climate Change). The report documents the known and likely occurrence of prehistoric archaeological remains across the whole floor of the North Sea including the SEA3 area, and makes suggestions on how to enhance the finding and reporting of such artefacts. Sea level change associated with the retreat of the last glaciation led to almost the whole floor of the North Sea being dry land at some time or another in the past 20,000 years. Similar exposure of the North Sea floor was also associated with earlier glacial cycles. Thus prehistoric submarine archaeological artefacts can occur over a wide area of the North Sea floor, as far north as the latitude of the Shetland Islands. While artefacts dating from the last 12,000 years are most likely, human or proto-human artefacts as old as half a million years may have survived in places. Submarine archaeological studies in the Danish Archipelago have established that coastal sites were an optimal place for prehistoric human occupation. Similar coastal sites existed over many parts of the North Sea floor in the past. The potential impact of oil and gas operations on submarine archaeological remains is discussed. Pipe entrenching is the most likely process to uncover prehistoric archaeological deposits.

Data links

Link Format Preview Updated
Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) data portal HTML 15/3/2024

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Additional information

Source Metadata
XML, HTML
Date added
30 August 2011
Harvest GUID
aba64100-c116-4de3-e044-0003ba6f30bd
Extent (Latitude)
56.4° to 51.1°
Extent (Longitude)
-2° to 3.3°
Spatial reference system
urn:ogc:def:crs:EPSG::4326
Dataset reference date (publication)
2002-08-01
Frequency of update
notPlanned
Responsible party
British Geological Survey (BGS) (custodian); Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) (originator)
ISO 19139 resource type
dataset
Metadata language
eng

Contact

Enquiries

offshoredata@bgs.ac.uk

Freedom of information (FOI) requests

Freedom of Information (FOI) requests

Licence information

The SEAs data were produced as part of the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change's Offshore Energy Strategic Environmental Assessment programme; Crown Copyright, all rights reserved. The DECC SEA must be acknowledged in any maps or publications that make use of the data. All the data files are freely available to the public. The Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) data portal provides free access to available data and reports which have been produced through the SEA process. The site is run and managed by BGS on behalf of the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). Many files can be downloaded directly from this website. Those that are too large to download can be ordered via the website for postal delivery from BGS. BGS (NERC) has been contracted by DECC to publish SEA datasets on its behalf. All intellectual property rights (including , without limitation, copyrights, database rights and all other rights which subsist or may at any time in the future subsist in the Dataset(s)) in the Dataset(s) ('Intellectual Property Rights') are owned by DECC (formerly the Department of Trade and Industry, and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform). BGS has been authorised by DECC to use SEA datasets for all purposes but on a 'not-for-profit basis'. BGS has been authorised by DECC to pass on SEA datasets to third parties so that they can use them for all purposes but on a 'not-for-profit' basis.