Mapping Crossroads: Archaeological and High Resolution Documentation of Nuclear Test Submerged Cultural Resources at Bikini Atoll

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Mapping Crossroads: Archaeological and High Resolution Documentation of Nuclear Test Submerged Cultural Resources at Bikini Atoll," at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In July 1946, the world’s first nuclear tests took place at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Two separate tests, code-named Able and Baker, deployed two plutonium core nominal yield 20 kiloton weapons against a fleet of 95 target ships. As a result of the tests, 21 vessels remain sunk in Bikini lagoon along with scattered test equipment, including aircraft and vehicles. In June 2019, the first comprehensive survey of the target fleet wrecks and all associated artifacts was conducted to gain a detailed sense through sonar mapping of the physical, archaeological legacy of these significant Cold War events. The survey revealed for the first time the crater from the July 25 test, an underwater blast, target ships, and artifacts including test aircraft. The survey also provided a detailed sonar survey of two more substantial hydrogen bomb tests that left two large overlapping craters on the edge of the atoll.