Island tales: culturally-filtered narratives about island creation through land submergence incorporate millennia-old memories of postglacial sea-level rise

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Submergence
• Australia
• Europe (northwest)
• memory
• narrative
• island

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Patrick Nunn

Patrick Nunn is Professor of Geography at the University of the Sunshine Coast where he focuses on Indigenous memories of palaeoenvironmental changes, especially in Australia and the Pacific Islands. He also researches methods of sustaining livelihoods in the face of global climate change, especially in the Global South.

Margaret Cook

Margaret Cook is a historian at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Her research focuses on humans and environmental interactions, especially with regards to water.