Diving In The Desert: A First Look At The Underwater Archaeology Of Walker Lake

Neil N Puckett

Diving In The Desert: A First Look At The Underwater Archaeology Of Walker Lake

Year: 2016

Summary

Underwater investigations of drowned terrestrial sites have become increasingly important to the pursuit of New World, prehistoric archaeology. The Atlantic and Gulf Coast shelves, the rivers of Florida, the Pacific Coast, and the Great Lakes have each provided evidence for human occupations in now inundated landscapes. These pursuits have resulted in invaluable information on human behavior, offered excellent preservation of perishable and datable materials, and often presented uniquely buried and stratified sites. In the Great Basin, perennial lakes offer rare opportunities to explore such stratified contexts. Lake level fluctuations from climate change have repeatedly drowned and buried previously accessible landscapes. Walker Lake in western Nevada, is one such lake. Research within the lake in 2015 was performed to identify buried archaeological deposits through sub-bottom profiling, test excavations, and coring. Here, a preliminary report of the results is presented along with plans to expand this research during the summer of 2016.

Cite this Record

Diving In The Desert: A First Look At The Underwater Archaeology Of Walker Lake. Neil N Puckett. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Washington, D.C. 2016 ( tDAR id: 434723)