Do Caves Have Agency?

Recent studies of later prehistoric cave use have stressed the affective qualities of these natural spaces. Certain properties of caves, darkness, constriction and their active geomorphology for example, can lead to caves be characterised as active agents, natural places with profound powers. However, is it really plausible to interpret caves, inanimate geological formations, as active agents? This paper will review arguments on social, environmental and material agency. This will include Structuration theory, with its emphasis on human consciousness as a key aspect of agency, Ingold's 'Dwelling perspective', which allows the possibility of non-human agents, the work of Alfred Gell and Actor Network Theory. Two common threads are drawn from these approaches to describe the way that things act. Things act in accordance with the properties they have and in a way that is structured and enabled by their past history. From this perspective caves can be shown to act and therefore caves would have been perceived as having agency

Great Britain: the intertidal and underwater archaeology of Britain’s submerged landscapes

The submerged landscapes around Great Britain are extensive and would have offered productive territory for hunting, gathering, exploitation of aquatic and marine resources, and—in the final stages of postglacial sea-level rise—opportunities for agriculture. They would also have provided land connections to continental Europe and opportunities for communication by sea travel along now-submerged palaeocoastlines and river estuaries. Most of the archaeological material has been discovered in intertidal or shallow water conditions, but there are also discoveries in deeper water, with dates ranging from earliest human presence nearly one million years ago up to the establishment of modern sea level. Some later material is present where coastlines have continued to sink in more recent millennia. Intertidal sites are especially well represented because of relatively large tidal ranges and shallow offshore gradients on many coastlines. These are often associated with remains of submerged forests, which are periodically exposed at low tide and then covered up again by movements of sand. Some of the most distinctive intertidal finds are the human and animal footprints preserved in intertidal sediments in many locations, especially at Goldcliff East. The earliest, at Happisburgh, are dated between 0.78 and 1 Ma. Fully submerged sites include the Mesolithic site of Bouldnor Cliff with its worked timbers, and the Middle Stone Age artefacts from offshore aggregate Area 240 along with well-preserved ice age fauna and environmental indicators. Pioneering work using oil industry seismic records has produced detailed reconstructions of the submerged landscape, and this is being followed up by new work involving targeted acoustic survey and coring of sediments

Tsunami from the Storegga Landslide

The Storegga tsunami was generated by the Storegga landslide off the Norwegian coast about 8150 years ago. The tsunami deposits show that the coasts of Scotland, Norway, Shetland, Faroe Islands and possibly also Eastern Greenland and Denmark was inundated, and that the tsunami ran up to heights ranging from 3 to more than 20 meters above sea level of that time. The Storegga tsunami is important for two reasons: First, it shows that big tsunamis have happened along passive margins and outside of the Pacific Ocean. Second, it is the only slide-generated tsunami of a basin-wide range where the run-up has been mapped out in the field and the tsunami simulated with numerical models