A History of Archaeological Thought of Submerged Paleolandscapes, 1006-2023

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Attention this is a Submergency: Incorporating Global Submerged Records", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

People have been observing submergence and finding underwater sites for centuries. Early examples of Abbot Ealdred of St. Albans (1006), Nâsir-i-Khusrau (1047), and Benjamin of Tudela (1173), reveal how Christian, Muslim, and Jewish worldviews informed interpretations of submerged sites, as Renaissance (e.g. Alberti, Biondo, Rößlin, etc.) and Enlightenment (e.g. Hooke, Linnaeus, Celsius, etc.) publications reveal the same for those periods. This paper charts the intellectual trajectory of underwater paleolandcapes, putting the ’historical archaeology’ in submerged prehistory. The advent of modern “maritime archaeology” in 1960 severed a connection to hundreds of intellectual investigations (i.e. non-salvage) underwater, the bulk of which examined paleolandscapes. Drawing inspiration of Bruce Trigger’s monumental work on archaeological theory, the author will review these pre-modern projects and their intellectual development, contextualizing the field today in light of a centuries long investigation into Earth movements and humans’ place on this planet.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Attention this is a Submergency: Incorporating Global Submerged Records   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow