Linking the knowns with the knowns: articulating submerged landscapes at the mesoscale
Author(s): Jessica Cook Hale
Year: 2025
Summary
This is an abstract from the "<html>Twenty Thousand Leagues (and Years!) under the Sea:<i> </i>Exploring the Place of Seashores in Prehistoric Socio-economic Systems</html>" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
Studies of submerged landscapes tend to fall into two categories: landscape-scaled assessments or focused investigations of individual sites. This bipolar orientation isa functio n of the nature of submerged palaeolandscape studies, which face greater constraints than terrestrial ones.These can be partially overcome by advances in remote sensing allowing higher resolution mapping of seabed and stratigraphy and advances in sampling to better identify archaeological deposits. However, a middle range remains between intensive and extensive studies, within which site relationships to one another are not necessarily well documented or understood. This is critical for understanding formerly coastal occupations that lack onshore analogs. One method in which a middle range (pun intended) approach might be carried out employs broader scale spatial analyses to tease out correlations of sites to reconstructed paleoclimatological, paleoshoreline, and paleoecological conditions, onshore and off but still relies on assessment at a distance. Another method that we discuss here deploys a less sophisticated approach: diver survey to visually map in features across multiple sites to establish linkages between locations. Once mapped, features and the space between can be used alongside the sites themselves to add chronological and cultural detail to the landscape, including paleo-coastal adaptations without analog.
Cite this Record
Linking the knowns with the knowns: articulating submerged landscapes at the mesoscale. Jessica Cook Hale. Presented at The 90th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 2025 ( tDAR id: 509214)
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Abstract Id(s): 52547