Questions Unasked: Do Answers lie in Existing Deepwater Data?

Summary

Rapidly evolving technologies are enabling the oil and gas industry to expand subsea operations into increasingly remote and hostile marine environments each year. In the United States, regulatory requirements mandate that certain data be collected during these endeavors, and as a result, a vast amount of geophysical and Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) video data has been compiled over the past several years. However, to date there have been few opportunities to fully analyze this data and apply it to archaeological research questions, professional training, and examination of sites beyond a cursory investigation. Exploration, whether for industry or research purposes, has yielded numerous significant sites in the Gulf of Mexico. Using several deepwater examples, this paper questions whether the current approaches to deepwater archaeology and the resultant data allow archaeologists to extrapolate more or less information from these sites than methods used in shallow water.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2014   •
• Deepwater Archaeology: Advancements, Opportunities, and Limitations

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): SYM-69,07