Navigating Uncharted Waters - Staying up to date with new tools and best practices for underwater archaeological survey

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This poster highlights surveys by the US Army Corps of Engineers in North Carolina’s Outer Banks and Florida’s Tampa Bay. These studies illustrate how large-scale surveys and novel techniques are improving our ability to identify submerged resources, but are also increasing the need to develop strategies to assess the significance of potential features, in order to maintain best practices for the management of our underwater cultural heritage.

In order to safely survey the dynamic, shallow shoals of the Outer Banks, the Corps employed the use of an aerial drone magnetometer. The resulting survey was able to capture data at nearly three times the speed of a boat-towed magnetometer survey, and removed the potential hazards associated with such shallow waters.

Lake Edgar, beneath Tampa Bay, is a late Pleistocene/early Holocene freshwater feature that served as the drainage basin for the various fluvial channels in the region. Surveys for multiple Tampa Bay federal projects have recorded locations of the now submerged the paleo lakeshore, thus potentially adding to our knowledge about the paleolandscape of the region and pre-contact archaeological deposits. Though not currently impacted by the project, effective and efficient assessments of these features is a challenge that requires consideration.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39968.0