Stone Age man

Whereas her colleagues excavate sites far away from towns and cities, where there is a chance they may be still be undamaged by the destructive effects of civilisation, Dr Spikins heads to a spot just 20 minutes from her central Newcastle office. It is there that she works on a site which could give us a previously undreamed-of insight into the lives of the very first people to settle in the North-East. The only slight down-side is that it's under the North Sea.

"It's very difficult to do exciting field work when you've got two kids, but I'm so close it stuns me to think about it. You imagine something new and exciting, some new discovery, is going to be somewhere remote, because archaeologists don't discover exciting things in built-up areas," she says.

It was on a practice dive to prepare for what she imagined would be the real work up in Scotland, that Dr Spikins came across two Stone Age settlements, including one which could be evidence of the earliest known settlers in Northern Britain. When news of the find was made public last week, it was instantly christened the Geordie Atlantis. It may not be so far from the truth.

The settlements are evidence that the first Britons may well have been coastal dwellers. Originally on dry land, the sites were submerged when the sea level rose, swollen by the melting glaciers, at the end of the last Ice Age, some 10,000 years ago. So far, two sites have been discovered, but on a land mass which at one time stretched to continental Europe, there are bound to be more.

Dr Spikins, a specialist in the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic - or Stone Age - periods, became interested in coastal settlements during a two-year stint working in Patagonia, in South America. Back in the North-East, where she lectures at Newcastle University, she put in an application for funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board to look for submerged sites around the British coast. When the cash came through, she set out fully expecting her search to be fruitless.

"Our project was viewed as very risky and highly likely not to work," she says. "When you think there's up to 10,000 years of wave action and all sorts of destruction, you think there just won't be anything left. We were putting a lot of effort into something that probably was not going to work

The plan was to look at sites off the Scottish coast, but first Dr Spikins had to learn to dive. This took her to the coast off Tynemouth.

"I noticed there were big nodules of flint, the raw materials people used to make tools, and that in itself was a surprise, but amongst those there were all sorts of artefacts. Even though a lot of people go diving there, unless you are an expert in that period you don't really recognise what it is.

"To a lot of people, they just look like stones, but if you know what you are looking at, you realise you are swimming out over a Mesolithic site. I wasn't sure whether to believe it at first, but you only had to look at them to know you were dealing with Mesolithic finds. As it gradually sank in, I began to recognise how important it was. I have been to Patagonia looking at exciting things, but this is more exciting and more significant, and it is only 20 minutes away. It is absolutely amazing," she says.

Underwater archaeology may be convenient in some ways, but it's not without its hindrances. Poor visibility - just five metres in the North Sea - means it is easier to miss something, especially when it is likely to have been covered over by shifting silt, and divers can only spend a limited amount of time at the site. But the big advantage, and one that could prove crucial in making underwater sites some of the most important ever discovered in Britain, is that the silt could preserve some of the artefacts. Instead of being left with just stone, mainly used for tools, the prehistoric settlements may harbour organic matter, such as wood, bone and animal hides, which could tell us more about how our Stone Age ancestors lived.

Morten Engen, an expert in Geographical Information Systems (GIS), and underwater archaeology, has been recruited to the project, newly christened the Submerged Archaeological Landscapes Team (SALT), to help look for other potential sites. A veteran of field work in his native Norway, where such submerged settlements are common, he will combine a knowledge of pre-Ice Age terrain, including how it will have been affected by 10,000 years of erosion, with the known behaviour of Stone Age man, to pinpoint likely sites for future excavation.

"The primary factor for locating sites is the harbour," he says. "You could always put up a tent anywhere, but you couldn't build a harbour, so we will be looking for natural harbours. We will reconstruct the landscape of that time, although it is a very dynamic environment, with the waves and the sediments."

Preliminary study suggests the dwellers of one of the Tynemouth sites could have been the earliest recorded settlers in the North, establishing a link between the inhabitants of this region and the sea which has endured an Ice Age and 10,000 years. The ready supply of food, and a milder climate than inland, makes it a convincing scenario, but until now it has been the result of speculation rather than hard evidence.

Dr Spikins says: "We want to find out what these people did and how they lived their lives. The types of site we find in the Pennines, for example, are temporary camps - you don't really get permanent occupation because they were hunter-gatherers, but it is possible there were more settled places at the coast, and this is why it could be so important.

"Until now, there has been this complete gap in our knowledge. We didn't know whether the coast was important to people or not. And because often all we have is stone, it gives a very male-orientated view of the Mesolithic period, with tools and weapons. This could give us an insight into the lives of women and children, those people the stone tools are not telling us about."

Even if there are no more sites to be discovered, itself now an unlikely prospect and a far cry from the initial doubts over the project, the settlements have already vastly increased our knowledge of our Stone Age ancestors. And they have also given a new credibility to underwater archaeology, previously seen as predominantly about shipwrecks. The only other prehistoric underwater site is off Southampton, although the Tynemouth site is thought to be an earlier settlement.

"What I love about this site is the whole idea of being a preserved landscape," says Dr Spikins. "You can feel that by going underwater, you can imagine yourself being in the landscape and back at the coastline. It is discovering a site that nobody has seen before. That never happens on land."