Submerged Prehistoric Archaeology: Tackling the Issues of Scale and Context on the Gulf of Mexico Outer Continental Shelf

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The northwestern Gulf of Mexico outer continental shelf (OCS) includes approximately 38,660,700 acres of submerged land under federal permitting authority, which are in turn subject to Section 106-compliant archaeological survey. Both historic and prehistoric resources must be identified. While historic shipwrecks can occur in any water depth, sea-level curve data correlating with periods of known human occupation in North America suggest that only those portions of the OCS out to the 60m depth contour could have been exposed as dry land and available for human exploitation. Combined with predictive modeling developed over the last 40 years, archaeologists use geophysical data to identify high probability areas for the occurrence and preservation of archaeological sites, however this has not yet resulted in the indisputable identification of a prehistoric site. At issue is the attempt to identify discrete sites from a largely unexplored area; to date, only 0.827 m2 (8.901 ft2) of the northwestern OCS has been physically sampled for prehistoric archaeology. The authors will discuss a newly-funded study that will develop baseline characterizations within a 234 square miles area anchored by two identified paleolandscapes at depths of 17m BSL, and associated with the probable shoreline stand at approximately 8,000 BP.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26018