Abstract
Fifteen investigators in the Universities of Exeter, Durham and Bournemouth, the British Museum and Natural England have collaborated to produce the first meta-database of Holocene sediment cores for England increasing the number of core sites from 118 to 763 (Suggitt et al., Veget Hist Archaeobot; doi: 10.1007/s00334-015-0515-1, 2015). The final roster in their Electronic Supplementary Material (ESM-1) can be increased considerably by consulting both published and ‘grey’ literature from the coastal lowlands of England available from at least the 1870s onwards. No use has been made of the archives and publications of the British Geological Survey or the Soil Survey of England and Wales. Two examples are given from the coastal lowlands of Lancashire in north-west England and the submerged landscapes of Hartlepool Bay and adjacent areas on land in north-east England, the sediments of which have been treated in monographs recently published. Reference is made to other coastal lowlands in eastern and south-west England. The importance of a comprehensive meta-database cannot be underestimated for the starting point of investigations into vegetational history, climate and sea-level changes, environmental changes, and prehistoric land-use and settlement.
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Communicated by F. Bittmann.
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Tooley, M.J. A meta-database of Holocene sediment cores for England: missing data. Veget Hist Archaeobot 24, 749–752 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-015-0528-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-015-0528-9