Submerged Paleolithic of the Eastern Adriatic: Research Results, Problems, and Perspectives

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on the Paleolithic in the Mediterranean Region" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For a long time, underwater archeology has complemented the image of the past in different periods ranging from prehistory to the Industrial Age. In some regions, such as the Adriatic, it focused primarily on Greek and Roman periods, and on shipwrecks, while research on prehistoric sites has been rare but recently intensified. Paleolithic material was discovered from a few underwater sites at the Eastern Adriatic. The site of Kaštel Štafilić – Resnik (Dalmatia, Croatia) was systematically explored and along with Middle Paleolithic lithics contains also some Upper Paleolithic material. Paleolithic underwater sites provide important material for comparison with land sites and demonstrate that the hunter-gatherers of the Adriatic region occupied a much larger range of territory than documented from research based on land sites only. Therefore, this presentation synthesizes results of underwater Paleolithic research in Croatia focusing on the contribution of these results to a better understanding of landscape, mobility, and behavior of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. It also discusses methodological problems and limitation of this research and perspectives of Paleolithic underwater archaeology. This research has been partially funded by the project “Last Neandertals at the Crossroads of Central Europe and the Mediterranean” (Croatian Science Foundation, HRZZ-IP-2019-04-6649).

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Recent Research on the Paleolithic in the Mediterranean Region   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36524.0