Starting in 2026, the Research Unit FOR 5837 | Times of Rise and Failure (TORF) – Integrative research on the cultural landscape development in the North Frisian Wadden Sea region during the Common Era aims for the systematic multidisciplinary investigation and spatio-temporal reconstruction of the medieval coastal landscape of North Frisia (Schleswig-Holstein, Germany), that drowned during a severe storm surge in 1362 AD. Today, abundant relics of the once cultivated land lie hidden in the tidal flats, that are part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site ‘Wadden Sea’, extending from the Netherlands to Denmark.
In TORF, scientists from archaeology, geophysics, geography, geology, history, molecular biology and geoinformatics join their expertise in an interdisciplinary team, that has arisen from intense joint research in the Wadden Sea since 2015 within the course of three different DFG-funded research projects. Research culminated in the discovery of a large church, probably the one of famous Rungholt, some 7 km off the coast of Nordstrand Peninsula in 2023.
The Wadden Sea is a globally unique ecosystem in a highly dynamic coastal landscape. However, it is also the relic of a cultural landscape intensely shaped by humans. Especially since medieval times, efforts to cultivate the low-lying coastal areas produced a similar cultural landscape all along the southern North Sea coast, including dikes, drainage and peat extraction. Yet, human impact culminated in a series of self-enhancing processes like land subsidence and increased tidal range and storm surge levels, rendering the landscape highly vulnerable.
In North Frisia, systematic large-scale interventions only began in the 12th cent. AD and, within two centuries, caused the transformation of a natural coastal environment into a highly productive but also sensitive cultural landscape. By the effects of natural extreme events, much of North Frisia’s embanked cultural land was lost during the so-called 1st Grote Mandränke in 1362 AD and turned into a sub- and intertidal landscape. Until today, North Frisia stands as a striking symbol for the devastating effects of storm floods.
Despite our strong progress in research during the past decade, North Frisia’s medieval landscape is far from being fully understood. Important questions, still unsolved, concern (i) the cultural landscape’s extent and appearance before 1362 AD, (ii) the sea level development as starting point for land reclamation, (iii) the influence of extreme events and adaptation strategies against them, (iv) the human impact by settlement, cultivation and land use, (v) the social, political, clerical and economic organization, (vi) the effects of human impact on the overall coastal vulnerability, and (vii) the costs and benefits of land reclamation or reasons for its abandonment.
Since wide areas of the drowned landscape have not been reclaimed after 1362 AD, they act as a ‘time capsule’, and the widely preserved archaeological remains are of enormous value for the cultural heritage of North Frisia and the entire Wadden Sea region. Most important objectives are (i) to record, reconstruct and comprehend the manifold interactions between humans and their environment, (ii) to understand the rise and failure of human efforts to secure resources, expand settlement activities and fight against land loss by extreme events and (iii) to better comprehend the cultural and natural heritage of the region and to raise public awareness against coastal risks.
The TORF Research Unit combines seven subprojects and the coordination:
SP1 focuses on the physical remains of past human occupation in form of archaeological objects, settlement features and stratigraphy in the North Frisian Wadden Sea region to investigate the complex medieval human-environment interactions in the region as well as their relation to major land losses during storm surges.
SP2 develops and applies an integrative geophysical prospection approach of the drowned medieval cultural landscape in the North Frisian Wadden Sea that crosses scales by connecting regional stratigraphy and coastal protection measures with local settlement structures.
SP3 focuses on soils and sediments as valuable geoarchives to reconstruct natural dynamics and coastal geographies, investigate complex medieval human-environment interactions in North Frisia’s Wadden Sea region and decipher their relation to major land losses during storm surges like the 1362 ‘Grote Mandränke’.
SP4 investigates local and regional sea-level changes by the application of microfauna-based transfer functions to Holocene sediment archives to better understand the sea level development of North Frisia and its interrelationship with human settlement as well as early coastal management structures.
SP5 unravels North Frisia’s still fragmentary medieval history from contemporary written sources combined with archaeological finds and geoscientific evidence to better understand the socio-political, clerical and economic structures but also development of the region.
SP6 reconstructs medieval land use practices like arable and lifestock farming, their regional differences and intensities by combining faecal lipid biomarker (FML) and ancient sedimentary DNA (sedDNA) analyses of sediments from the medieval ground surface and optimising extraction methods.
SP7 develops and FAIRly provides a distributed data infrastructure for all TORF
projects and applies a digital approach to North Frisias medieval coastal landscape and its development, based on analyses of heterogeneous data sets (e.g., aerial images, remote sensing and geophysical prospection data, historical maps).
Coordination provides the scientific and administrative framework of TORF to achieve the research unit’s overall objectives. It ensures collaboration of the seven subprojects and manages joint research activities. Integrating external partners, stakeholders and collaborating scientists is the centrepiece of the coordination.
Since wide areas of North Frisia’s drowned landscape have not been reclaimed after 1362, the tidal flats act as a ‘time capsule’ allowing insights into medieval colonisation techniques and contemporaneous coastal protection infrastructure (e.g., farmland structure, settlement density, drainage systems, sizes of dykes and tidal gates), economic activities and socio-political structures (e.g., land use and management, trade activities, size/distribution of parishes). The tidal flat’s archaeological potential and value have been largely recognized before the 1970s when they were designated as excavation protection area.
Medieval archaeological remains preserved in the tidal flats are of enormous value not only for the cultural heritage of North Frisia, but the entire Wadden Sea region. Yet, recent studies show, that tidal dynamics can cause erosion of archaeological sites and sedimentary archives within a few years. Accelerating sea level rise and more frequent storm events will increase these processes of exposure and erosion and, thus, make research in this field a highly urgent issue. Moreover, while climate change is widely recognised as a threat to coastal protection, ecosystems and recreational values, impact on archaeological remains in the Wadden Sea region is hardly acknowledged and long-term consequences remain yet undetermined.
Over the past 100 years, regular archaeological survey, research projects and a long local tradition of citizen science contributed to our present understanding of North Frisia’s medieval coastal landscape and society. Yet, with more than 1,500 km² of tidal flats, the sheer size of the area, the prevailing natural conditions (tides, weather, accessibility) and a thick sediment cover on top of most finds so far prevented systematic and large-scale investigations, calling for a novel approach.
Since 2015, we develope and apply the so-called ‘type case approach’ to investigate the drowned medieval landscape of North Frisia. Within our many years of expertise in Wadden Sea research, we constantly adapted this interdisciplinary approach to the specific challenges of large-scale (medieval) landscape reconstruction in tidal flats and coastal marshlands.
The ‘type case approach’ initially combines geophysical prospection, geoarchaeological investigations and archaeological prospection in joint fieldwork and data evaluation and allows to carry out a diachronic large-scale systematic prospection of cultural relics preserved but hidden in the tidal flats. Our approach enables a detailed identification of functional areas such as settlements and farmland – independent from random finds. The Rungholt case study acted as model for the new, systematic multi-method prospection of entire settlements embedded in their surrounding cultural landscape.
Magnetic gradiometry, (2D & 3D) seismic imaging, electromagnetic induction (EMI) or electric resistivity tomography (ERT) measurements allow the detection, precise localisation and imaging of archaeological remains and their physical parameters covered by recent tidal flat sediments as well as stratigraphic information, in close methodological feedback with geoarchaeological investigations and archaeological prospection.
Sediment coring, Direct Push sensing, the analysis of sedimentary, geochemical and microfaunal palaeoenvironmental parameters (PEP) as well as radiocarbon and dendrochronological dating allow the spatio-temporal reconstruction of the natural as well as human-influenced landscape development over the past millennia as well as the evaluation of geophysical prospection data.
Regular survey (including metal detector survey, recovery of finds, drone imaging and DGPS mapping) and small excavations of both exposed and covered remains, the evaluation of archived data and finds as well as the contextualisation of geoscientific results give insights to the medieval way of life in the coastal marshes.
The complexity of the tidal flat archive offers the unique potential for a spatio-temporal reconstruction of North Frisia’s medieval coastal landscape. Yet, as a whole, this can only be obtained through a systematic multidisciplinary study of large parts of the North Frisian territory. A profound reconstruction also requires detailed and comprehensive knowledge on complex socio-environmental key factors on different spatial and temporal scales: natural coastal dynamics, sea level changes and extreme events, land reclamation techniques and coastal protection measures, settlement activities and economic practices or indications for social, political and economic motives.
Combining expertise from archaeology, history, geophysics, geography, geology, molecular biology and geoinformatics, the TORF research unit offers an effective interdisciplinary collaborative research network, capable to address and create synergies between the humanities and natural science. We consider the close cooperation between all TORF subprojects and thus the close interlinking of the participating disciplines as major advantage and the research unit as the optimal network for the essential thematic expansion of tidal flat research to achieve our challenging objectives.
Previous relative sea level (RSL) reconstructions along the southern North Sea coast are mainly based on the ‘classic peat’ approach, which has resulted in a data gap for the last 3000 years due to the absence of peat. The use of microfauna-based transfer functions that combine foraminifers and ostracods represents a powerful tool for addressing this data gap and reach RSL reconstructions with a decimetre-scale precision. Complemented by in situ archaeological, geophysical and geoarchaeological prospection data, the RSL reconstruction is essential to fully understand both gradual and rapid coastal changes in North Frisia and their linkage to human activities.
Key aspects of the social-cultural, economic, clerical, administrative and political organisation within North Frisia’s medieval history are still mostly unknown. Historical records will be used to shed new light on the political and societal drivers and frameworks for the medieval colonization of North Frisia, that led to the region’s economic ‘take-off’ and to investigate the processes of urbanisation and de-urbanisation reached in the densely settled marshes. A special focus of both historical and archaeological research will also be on a possible ‘Frisian modus operandi’ regarding techniques and processes behind land reclamation and settlement patterns.
For North Frisia, historical sources imply that the region’s prosperity in medieval times was partly based on intense agricultural use of the coastal landscape but so far, there is a lack of empirical evidence regarding the type and intensity of human agricultural activity. The combined analyses of faecal lipid marker (FLM) and ancient sedimentary DNA (sedDNA) for sediments from the medieval ground surface offers a promising method to reconstruct former land use practices in terms of crop or livestock farming for subsistence or even trade.
To develop a data infrastructure for TORF that deals with a distributed ecosystem of research data within the individual subprojects (e.g., structured and non-structured data, imaging data, spatial data, media) will be essential to promote synergies between the subprojects and guarante that TORF data will be accessible according to the FAIR principles. Also, spatial data analysis helps to create a comprehensive model of medieval North Frisia from evaluation of aerial images, digital orthophotos, historical maps, LIDAR and satellite data as well as seismic prospection results, e.g., by the application of structure- and element-finding methods.
Majchczack, B., Blankenfeldt, R., Hadler, H., Wilken, D., Schnakenberg, K., Bäumler, S., Klooß, S., Reiß, A., Bienen-Scholt, D., Vött, A.
2025
Hadler, H., Reiß, A., Willershäuser, T., Wilken, D., Blankenfeldt, R., Majchczack, B., Klooß, S., Ickerodt, U., Vött, A.
2025
Wilken, D., Hadler, H., Majchczack, B., Blankenfeldt, R., Auge, A., Bäumler, S., Bienen-Scholt, D., Ickerodt, U., Klooß, S., Reiß, A., Willershäuser, T., Rabbel, W., Vött, A.
2024
Blankenfeldt, R., Klooß, S., Hadler, H., Majchczack, B.S., Wilken D & Bienen-Scholt, D.
2022
Reiß, A., Hadler, H., Wilken, D., Majchczack, B.S., Blanken-feldt, R., Bäumler, S., Ickerodt, U., Klooß, S., Willershäuser, T., Rabbel, W., Vött, A.
2025
Majchczack, B., Blankenfeldt, R., Bienen-Scholt, D., Hadler, H., Jürgens, F., Klooß, S., Reiß, A., Wilken, D., von Carnap-Bornheim, C., Rabbel, W., Vött, A.
2024
Wilken, D., Hadler, H., Wunderlich, T., Majchczack, B., Schwardt, M., Fediuk, A., Fischer, P., Willershäuser, T., Klooß, S., Vött, A., Rabbel, W.
2022
Learn about the challenging research in North Frisia’s tidal flats!