The United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration places ecosystem rehabilitation at the forefront of global efforts to restore biodiversity and tackle climate change. From a cultural and historical perspective, peatland environments are essential for the preservation of important archaeological sites, artefacts and palaeoecological records that do not survive on drier landscapes. Peatland degradation and destruction has in the past resulted in the damage and loss of significant numbers of sites and those that remain are vulnerable to human activities and processes associated with climate change. Although peatland restoration offers significant positive benefits for the in situ preservation of surviving peatland archaeology, explicit consideration of the nature and vulnerability of the archaeological resource tends to be omitted from academic discussions and practical peatland restoration schemes. This short communication highlights the key issues associated with the maintenance and protection of the cultural heritage of peatlands and concludes that improved communication between heritage and peatland restoration programmes and agendas is now urgently needed to ensure the preservation in situ of archaeological sites and deposits.

The use of metagenomic datasets to support ancient sedimentary DNA (sedaDNA) for paleoecological reconstruction has been demonstrated to be a powerful tool to understand multi-organism responses to climatic shifts and events. Authentication remains integral to the ancient DNA discipline, and this extends to sedaDNA analysis. Furthermore, distinguishing authentic sedaDNA from contamination or modern material also allows for a better understanding of broader questions in sedaDNA research, such as formation processes, source and catchment, and post-depositional processes. Existing tools for the detection of damage signals are designed for single-taxon input, require a priori organism specification, and require a significant number of input sequences to establish a signal. It is therefore often difficult to identify an established cytosine deamination rate consistent with ancient DNA across a sediment sample. In this study, we present MetaDamage , a tool that examines cytosine deamination on a metagenomic (all organisms) scale for multiple previously undetermined taxa and can produce a damage profile based on a few hundred reads. We outline the development and testing of the MetaDamage tool using both authentic sedaDNA sequences and simulated data to demonstrate the resolution in which MetaDamage can identify deamination levels consistent with the presence of ancient DNA. The MetaDamage tool offers a method for the initial assessment of the presence of sedaDNA and a better understanding of key questions of preservation for paleoecological reconstruction.

Palaeoclimatic proxies from records in northwest Europe evidence a climatic deterioration, known as the ‘2.8 ka Event’, which broadly coincided with the transition from Later Bronze Age to Iron Age in Ireland. This Bronze Age-Iron Age transition in Ireland has been invoked in various hypotheses concerning the relationship between environmental and cultural change. This paper offers a brief review of contrasting archaeological interpretations of the transition, outlines the gaps and uncertainties in current knowledge and highlights the role of climate change in some of these uncertainties. This is followed by a discussion of palaeoclimate records from peatlands, and in particular the utility of bog surface wetness records (BSW) to identify geographically and chronologically coherent periods of Holocene climate change, including the period around 750 BC (2.8 ka), which is apparent in both UK and Irish records. Whilst BSW records provide evidence of relative shifts from wet/cold to warm/dry conditions, quantitative indices of temperature and precipitation cannot be derived from these data. Recent work discounting a link between a demographic ‘collapse’ and climate change is considered, as is the importance of local-scale records for understanding the archaeology of peatlands. The role of ‘bog burst’ events (catastrophic hydrological failures of the physical integrity of peatland) in driving palaeohydrological changes in certain Irish peatlands is outlined. Whilst ‘bog bursts’ might confound the extraction of regional climatic meaning, they provide important contextual evidence for human activity and the associated archaeological record. Although there are some coherent patterns in palynological records, others demonstrate spatial and chronological differences in vegetation change and human impact across the Late Bronze Age to Iron Age, but the implications for changes in the distribution of human populations are unclear. The paper concludes with a consideration of the importance of robust chronologies for integrating archaeological, palaeoenvironmental and palaeoclimatological data to investigate potential links between climate and cultural change. The importance of different analytical, spatial and chronological scales to investigate the complex and recursive nature of the relationship between human activity and climatic change is discussed.

Doggerland was a landmass occupying an area currently covered by the North Sea until marine inundation took place during the mid-Holocene, ultimately separating the British landmass from the rest of Europe. The Storegga Event, which triggered a tsunami reflected in sediment deposits in the northern North Sea, northeast coastlines of the British Isles and across the North Atlantic, was a major event during this transgressive phase. The spatial extent of the Storegga tsunami however remains unconfirmed as, to date, no direct evidence for the event has been recovered from the southern North Sea. We present evidence of a tsunami deposit in the southern North Sea at the head of a palaeo-river system that has been identified using seismic survey. The evidence, based on lithostratigraphy, geochemical signatures, macro and microfossils and sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA), supported by optical stimulated luminescence (OSL) and radiocarbon dating, suggests that these deposits were a result of the tsunami. Seismic identification of this stratum and analysis of adjacent cores showed diminished traces of the tsunami which was largely removed by subsequent erosional processes. Our results confirm previous modelling of the impact of the tsunami within this area of the southern North Sea, and also indicate that these effects were temporary, localized, and mitigated by the dense woodland and topography of the area. We conclude that clear physical remnants of the wave in these areas are likely to be restricted to now buried, palaeo-inland basins and incised river valley systems.

In this paper we discuss the entangled relationship between literary creation, archaeology and representations of gender in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, in particular the ‘bog poems’ The Tollund Man and Bogland. We trace the early formative connections between the poet, peatlands and ‘bog body’ research, in which both literary critical and archaeological scholars have analysed themes including ‘the bog as archive’, theory and practice of archaeology and the process of poetic creation and imagining in Heaney’s writings. We discuss archaeological perspectives on Heaney’s poetry, and outline literary critique that has problematised the representation of gender in the ‘bog poems’. Finally, we consider the poem Bogland and read this through the lens of Irish peatland archaeology, in particular its destruction by industrial peat extraction. To conclude, we reflect how Heaney’s poetry as a form of archaeological knowledge and narratives must continue to be subject to ‘excavation’, contextual readings and critique.