Bogs, marshes, swamps, and fens. Did you know that ancient wetlands were once a rich environment for people to live in?
Today, human activity is changing the natural world – a world that includes plants, animals, and landscapes. But we’re on a mission to reveal what some of our modern environments were like many thousands of years ago…
Which plants, animals and people occupied the area back then? And how did humans make use of those ancient environment? We’re planning an exciting mission with a blend of fieldwork, GIS and geoarchaeology to find out!
What’s the plan?
Our project focuses on an area called Carrlands, along the middle section of the River Skerne in County Durham. We think it could be the site of an ancient lake whose history may stretch all the way back to the last Ice Age around 12,000 years ago, so we’re looking for a team of people to take part in various workshops and activities to help us uncover what’s happening here.
This includes training in how deposits are modelled and landscapes reconstructed all from information obtained through boreholes, soil auger logs and test pit profiles. Using GIS, we’ll also generate a map plotting the entire extent of this prehistoric lake, and identify areas that are the most promising for future investigation and preservation!
You’ll get to be a real Citizen Scientist, helping to reveal some of the incredible history along the banks of the River Skerne in County Durham as part of the Discover Brightwater Project.
More about the area
Nobody has investigated this area on such a large scale before, so this project could answer loads of important questions! Using similar sites for comparison, we know that the Carrlands area would have once had a mosaic of wetland habitats with small ‘islands’ of dry land. Places like this were perfect for human settlement in prehistory.
The peat here has done an amazing job of preserving the organic remains, which gives us clues into both the wildlife and the human impact in this area over the thousands of years. We’re super excited to take the next step in exploring the ancient human relationship with this unique and fascinating corner of the world.
The Carrlands area highlighted in red
The Citizen Science team
This project is being led by geoarchaeologists Freya Horsfield and Karen Milek from Durham University on behalf of Discover Brightwater, with support from us at DigVentures and our environmentally enthusiastic team of Citizen Scientists!
