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

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Geosciences
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 541064351

The UNESCO World Heritage Site ‘Wadden Sea’ is a globally unique ecosystem in a highly dynamic landscape. However, it is also the relic of a cultural landscape intensively shaped by mankind. All along the southern North Sea coasts, efforts to cultivate the low-lying coastal areas produced a similar cultural landscape, including dikes, drainage and peat extraction. 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 a transformation of the natural 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 symbol for the devastating effects of storm floods. Despite strong progress in research, 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 since 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. By the systematic multidisciplinary investigation of large parts of the North Frisian territory, the FOR5837 (TORF) aims at the spatio-temporal reconstruction of North Frisia’s medieval coastal landscape as a whole. 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. TORF has arisen from intense interdisciplinary research in the Wadden Sea since 2015 which 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 highly interdisciplinary FOR5837 team comprises scientists from archaeology, geoarchaeology, geophysics, history, molecular biology, geology and data science.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• International Connection: Sweden

Projects

• A region in urban take-off: Rungholt and the North Frisian coast in the 14th century based on the North Frisian Wadden Sea Landscape Archive (Applicant Auge, Oliver )
• Coordination Funds (Applicant Hadler, Hanna )
• Digitally approaching North Frisia’s lost landscape by Spatial Data Analysis and Geodata infrastructure within TORF (SP7) (Applicant Busch, Alexandra )
• Reconstructing coastal geographies and deciphering medieval human-environment interactions from North Frisia’s sedimentary archives (Applicants Hadler, Hanna ;  Vött, Andreas )
• Rising sea level and former coastlines in North Frisia - SEAFRONT SP4 of FOR 5837 (TORF) (Applicant Bungenstock, Friederike )
• SP1: Medieval Frisian settlers in a dynamic coastal landscape (Applicants Blankenfeldt, Ruth ;  Ickerodt, Ulf ;  Majchczack, Bente Sven ;  Quast, Dieter )
• SP2: Enveloping the drowned medieval cultural landscape of the North Frisian Wadden Sea (Applicants Krastel, Sebastian ;  Wilken, Dennis )
• SP6: Reconstruction of North Frisia’s human-ecosystem interactions on molecular level (Applicants Fiedler, Sabine ;  Krause-Kyora, Ben )

• Spokesperson: Dr. Hanna Hadler