| Summary: | The concept of a single "25 foot raised beach" has dominated opinion on the relationship between Scottish archaeological material and sea level change for most of the present century. Recent work has however demonstrated that Holocene coastal changes were much more complicated than this concept suggested. These complexities have not yet been fully resolved, either in Scotland or elsewhere. Doubt exists as to how far sequences of changes observed in one area are likely also to be represented on other stretches of coastline. At present, Scottish geomorphological and archaeological evidence does not in itself appear adequate for a reliable evaluation of this. The seaboard of Western Europe between north Norway and Biscay contains a substantially wider range of Holocene land movement regimes and coastal environments than is represented in Scotland, and thus offers a basis for assessing the relative importance of ocean level variations and more local factors. The evaluation of this type of interplay and the isolation of the eustatic(ocean wide) component has long been a matter of controversy in the literature. During the past decade, however, almost a thousand radiocarbon dates relevant to Holocene coastal changes have become available in Western Europe. These permitted the development of a new type of approach to the problem, based on a detailed analysis of the timing of episodes of transgression and regression. From this it became apparent that despite the diversity of conditions on the European seaboard, the ubiquitous influence of ocean level variations had dominated the timing of shoreline changes throughout the Holocene. The only major exception was the Baltic, when cut off from the ocean during periods such as the "Ancylus Lake" stage, but it proved possible to define these phases closely in terms of C¹⁴ chronology. None of the published Holocene eustatic curves appears to be based on more than about 10% of the number of radiocarbon dates included in the present survey. Accordingly, a new curve taking these ...
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