Submerged Cultural Resources and the Maritime Heritage of the Great Lakes

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Submerged Cultural Resources and the Maritime Heritage of the Great Lakes," at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Great Lakes have created a maritime heritage unique to the region, evidence of which can be found preserved in the waters of these Inland Seas. Estimates suggest there are anywhere between 1,400 and 8,000 shipwrecks in Lake Erie alone. In 2018, survey work sponsored by the Ohio History Connection focused explicitly on eastern Ohio, specifically the waters off of Ashtabula County. Located just west of the border between Ohio and Pennsylvania, the harbors at Conneaut and Ashtabula were important industrial and commercial ports in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first papers in this session will review Ohio's submerged cultural resource potential, present results from the 2018 survey work, and discuss the contributions of MAST and PASST, avocational dive groups in Lake Erie. Additional research will also be presented on Wisconsin shipwrecks and the associated iron mining industry, and a Native American maritime cultural landscape.