Hunting for Hunters, Underwater: Results and Future Directions for Submerged Ancient Sites

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Hunting for Hunters, Underwater: Results and Future Directions for Submerged Ancient Sites" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Since 2008, interdisciplinary investigations in Lake Huron (Great Lakes, USA) have systematically approached the archaeology of a submerged landscape. This multi-scalar research has identified a cultural occupation which dates to ~9,500-8,900 cal yr BP and methods have included geophysical survey, remotely operated vehicle mapping, excavation in 30+ meters of water, predictive modeling, and virtual world simulations. With a unique cold, far offshore, and deep, freshwater setting – archaeological sites (n=33) and materials, including stone hunting architecture and lithic artifacts, are preserved within their original spatial and paleoenvironmental contexts. Research below the lake fundamentally transforms our understanding of early Holocene hunter-gatherers and our approaches to underwater archaeology more generally. Papers within this session will present the various embedded components of the project as well as compare the Lake Huron finds with those from elsewhere in the global north including Canada, the Baltic, and the North Sea.