Fish or Flint? A Cursory Examination of a Method for Identifying Buried Lithic Artifacts Underwater

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.

Recent research has demonstrated the potential for the remote identification of human altered lithic material in underwater contexts. The underlying principle of this method is the ability of low frequency sound waves to resonate within lithic materials of an ideal shape, making the material vibrate. These vibrations disrupt sound waves in a manner that can be consistently observed in SONAR profiles. These signals appear as “haystacks:” parabolic and wavy anomalies in the water column. The underlying geophysics of this method were replicated in the Wellbore Acoustic Lab at Texas A&M University in November, 2018 and were field tested in the summer of 2019. This paper explores the underlying geophysical processes at work, identifies avenues for further testing and refinement of the method, and discusses potential pitfalls of the method.

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): 1013