ABSTRACT

In many long-enduring coastal cultures, there are stories – sometimes mythologized – about times when pieces of land became separated from mainlands by submergence, a process that created islands where none existed before. Using examples from northwest Europe and Australia, this paper argues that many such stories recall times, often millennia ago, when sea level in the aftermath of the Last Glaciation (last ice age) was rising and transforming coastal landscapes and their human uses in exactly the ways these stories describe. The possibility that these may have arisen from eyewitness accounts of these transformative processes, hitherto thought to be understandable only by scientific (palaeoenvironmental) reconstructions, should encourage more systematic investigations of such stories by scientists. It also suggests that science has traditionally underestimated the capacity of oral (pre-literate) cultures to acquire, encode and sustain their observations of memorable events with a high degree of replication fidelity.

摘要

在许多长期存在的沿海文化中，有一些故事——有时被神话化了——关于土地因淹没而与大陆分离的时代，这一过程创造了以前不存在的岛屿。本文使用欧洲西北部和澳大利亚的例子，认为许多这样的故事都让人回想起通常是几千年前的时代，当时末次冰河期（末次冰河时代）之后的海平面正在上升，并改变了沿海景观及其在人类活动中的用途。这些故事描述的方式。这些可能来自目击者对这些变革过程的描述，迄今为止被认为只有通过科学（古环境）重建才能理解，这可能会鼓励科学家对这些故事进行更系统的调查。