Twelve Days at Sea: Preliminary Results of the 2019 Geophysical Survey Campaign of Submerged Pre-Contact Landscapes in the Northwestern Gulf of Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Love That Dirty Water: Submerged Landscapes and Precontact Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Sea-level rise models demonstrate that, prior to the last glacial maximum, there was a larger landmass available for pre-contact human habitation in North America. Previous research has identified two landscape features offshore, situated 48 miles apart; both at water depths of 17 m BSL and both dated to approximately 8,500 BP. Located on the coastline between these two features are known archaeological sites dating to the same time period. For this investigation, we used the two locations and shoreline to create a polygon of potential interest, narrowing down our search area from 40 million acres of continental shelf to a more manageable 234 mi2. From there we identified five key areas to begin our search, all within the same depth range. This paper will present the methods used to select survey sites, and present preliminary results from the geophysical remote-sensing conducted in May-June, 2019.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Love That Dirty Water: Submerged Landscapes and Precontact Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 893