Submerged prehistory in the Americas: Methods, approaches and results

Abstract

Archaeology underwater has experienced a renaissance in both popular and professional interest as witnessed in numerous movies, television specials, academic papers, conference symposia, and a spate of recent textbooks. For most archaeologists, as well as in the public imagination, underwater archaeology is the romantic discovery and study of shipwrecks. The best-known underwater discoveries to date have involved lost vessels and many of the techniques used for underwater exploration were designed initially for shipwreck hunting. Yet, there are fundamental differences between the study of shipwrecks and the investigation of ancient archaeological sites on now submerged landscapes. Shipwrecks pose, essentially, a historical problem. Whether we are searching for a known vessel that was lost, or attempting to identify a discovered wreck, the investigation is paradigmatically a historical one. The goal of the exercise is to link the material remains with a documentary record. Except for possibly identifying ancient shipping lanes or wreck traps, the location and character of the sea floor where the wreck is encountered is incidental. If, on the other hand, we want to investigate archaeological sites on a submerged landscape, the problem is entirely different. Now, the sea floor location is critical since it represents the land surface on which the ancient inhabitants lived, and its reconstructed environment provides the primary line of evidence for discovering ancient sites. This type of study is paradigmatically anthropological and requires a different set of approaches, even as many of the underwater survey techniques remain the same. Underwater archaeology, although a relatively new branch of academic research, has mirrored the development of modern archaeology. It experienced its own New Archaeology phase initiated by Keith Muckelroy (1978), a student of David Clarke at Cambridge, who attempted to systematize and theorize the study of maritime archaeology. It has also experienced the bumps and bruises that accompanied the legal and ethical issues inherent to compliance-based archaeology. However, no unified disciplinary or conceptual model for prehistoric underwater research has yet emerged. The archaeological sites preserved on the world’s continental shelves are relevant to a wide range of contemporary research questions, and their importance increases with the heightened awareness of climate change and associated changes in modern sea levels. Certainly, in the Americas, where much interest relating to the early colonization of the