Twenty Thousand Leagues (and Years!) under the Sea: Exploring the Place of Seashores in Prehistoric Socio-economic Systems
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "<html>Twenty Thousand Leagues (and Years!) under the Sea:<i> </i>Exploring the Place of Seashores in Prehistoric Socio-economic Systems</html>" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
In today's coastal regions, our socio-economic models often fail to integrate the place of maritime environments. Numerous ethnographic examples often show specificities of these environments in terms of mobility and social organization. Depending on the period studied/specific features of the continental shelf prehistoric coastlines may have been located a few hundred miles from the present-day coastline which limits our thinking. Should we give up and dismiss the role played by these submerged environments and sites? While it is imperative to be aware of this bias it also seems possible today to feed this thinking. Indirectly it is possible to discuss the place of these environments through the study of diffusion of marine resources or by studying graphic depictions of these environments in continental sites. Directly development of new geophysical and deep sea exploration methods and tools is a great opportunity to look for the sites. This session looks at how we can better integrate the role of maritime environments in our overall understanding of prehistoric systems. It is open to hunter-gatherers’ contexts for all periods/regions of the world and focuses as much on the detailed study of archaeological material as on methodological developments for the investigation of submerged sites.
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