Survey for stone wall fish weirs on the continental shelf near Haida Gwaii, British Columbia using an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV).
Author(s): Bradley Colin; Fedje Daryl; Alison Proctor; Quentin Mackie
Year: 2015
Summary
The search for early human occupation on drowned continental shelves is hampered by the low archaeological visibility of typical hunter-gatherer sites. Predictive modelling for site locations can produce polygons of potential, but these need to be tested both to evaluate the model and to recover material remains. Sampling of underwater predictive model potential polygons is difficult, expensive and usually low-return. However, some sites, such as stone-wall fish weirs, may be directly visible to imaging technologies such as sidescan sonar and also tend to be in relatively predictable locations. Guided by high-resolution swath bathymetry showing terrestrial landforms on the seafloor, we conducted a short survey program for fish weirs using a Bluefin-12 Autonomous Underwater Vehicle equipped with sidescan sonar. The study area includes paleo-river channels on the continental shelf adjacent to Haida Gwaii at depths up to 140 meters. In the immediate area, the Gaadu Din caves contain artifacts dated to 12,500 cal BP and salmon remains to 14,000 cal BP, putting both people and salmon on this drowned landscape. This paper reviews the rationale and methodology of this 2014 program.
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Cite this Record
Survey for stone wall fish weirs on the continental shelf near Haida Gwaii, British Columbia using an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV).. Quentin Mackie, Alison Proctor, Fedje Daryl, Bradley Colin. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 394971)
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Keywords
Geographic Keywords
North America - NW Coast/Alaska
Spatial Coverage
min long: -169.717; min lat: 42.553 ; max long: -122.607; max lat: 71.301 ;