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Paper short abstract

Submerged histories of the North Sea—Nehalennia’s altars and the lost landscape of Doggerland—show how knowledge emerges through extraction yet remains shaped by the sea’s opacity. Submergence becomes an aquatic epistemology that delays discovery and invites relational ways of knowing.

Paper long abstract

In 1970, fisherman K.J. Bout recovered fragments of altar stones dedicated to the pre-Christian sea goddess Nehalennia from the North Sea, initiating the rediscovery of hundreds of worship objects lost for nearly 1,700 years. This resurfacing of ritual artefacts unsettles the Netherlands’ cultural narrative of mastering water and exposes a striking absence of aquatic mythologies within Dutch cultural memory. At the same time, archaeological and geological discoveries beneath the North Sea have revealed Doggerland, a vast Mesolithic landscape that once connected Britain and continental Europe before being submerged by rising seas around 8,500 years ago.

This paper brings the rediscovery of Nehalennia into dialogue with the mapping of Doggerland to examine how submerged histories become legible. Both cases reveal that knowledge of the seabed emerges through the infrastructures of extraction—seismic surveys, dredging, and industrial marine mapping—while also remaining shaped by the opacity and instability of the sea itself. Rather than treating submergence as disappearance, the paper proposes it as an epistemological condition. The sea functions as a living archive that gathers, mutates, and delays evidence, challenging land-based archaeological methods oriented toward excavation and visibility.

Drawing on media theorist Melody Jue’s concept of seawater as a medium, the paper explores how submergence may offer an embodied and relational method for engaging with aquatic histories. Thinking with the sea foregrounds opacity, immersion, and entanglement as ways of learning from environments that resist capture.

Keywords: Doggerland, Nehalennia, submergence, aquatic archives, environmental humanities, maritime archaeology.