Methodological Approaches to Landscape Reconstruction and Geoarchaeological Analyses of the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Geoarchaeology Within the Context of Cultural Resource Management (CRM) Today (Part One)" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) is a gradually sloping set of Quaternary sediments generally extending 50 to 100 miles east of the Atlantic coast. With depths of 50 meters or more, low sea-levels after the Last Glacial Maximum allowed the OCS landscape to include rivers, lakes, forests, floodplains, and a shoreline much further east. This environment was ideal for the First Americans arriving to the region, learning the landscape, and using local resources. Our understanding of landscape preservation on the OCS is limited, but with the onset of offshore wind development this has begun to change: extensive geophysical surveys informed by geotechnical and geoarchaeological sediment analyses are revealing preserved fluvial, lacustrine, and shoreline features that existed prior to sea-level rise and inundation. This paper discusses the methodologies adopted by SEARCH geoarchaeologists to analyze and model landscape preservation on the OCS. We provide a general overview of the sub-bottom datasets used to model the former subaerial OCS. We further discuss the successful adoption of geoarchaeological coring campaigns, core analyses, radiocarbon dating, palynology, and grain analyses to better inform our expectations and models of landscape preservation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Geoarchaeology Within the Context of Cultural Resource Management (CRM) Today (Part One)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51693