Continental shelf landscapes of the southeastern United States since the last interglacial

Mobility and Ancient Society in Asia and the Americas

“…In the Southeast, multibeam echosounder bathymetric surveys are being used to great effect to document terrain variability on the continental shelf, to the point where individual scarps and prominences are being identifi ed as possible areas of settlement, such as Bulls Scarp off Charleston, South Carolina (Harris et al 2013 ). Indeed, the data developed by Harris's team is at a much higher resolution than that from the US Coastal Relief Model employed herein, showing the kinds of analyses possible once such data are developed and made widely available.…”

“…6.2 ). The sea level reconstruction employed here is similar to one employed on the South Atlantic seaboard in the vicinity of South Carolina (Harris et al 2013 ), and in broad outline corresponds to reconstructions developed from other parts of the world (e.g., Bard et al 1990Bard et al , 2010Gregoire et al 2012 ;Siddall et al 2003 ). Specifi c calendar years in the analyses results reported herein refer to sample point estimated ages in the sea level reconstruction in Balsillie and Donoghue ( 2004 :Appendix II).…”

“…Such settings may exist, such as river mouths or high peaks along the coast, or prominent near-shore islands along major movement pathways, like Isla Cedros, Isla Ángel de la Guarda, and Tiburón Island on the east and west sides of Baja California (e.g., Des Lauriers 2006 , 2011 ), or on the Channel Islands, which appear to have been reached quite early Johnston et al 2002 ). Bulls Scarp on the continental shelf off South Carolina may have also been such a setting, used for rendezvous and aggregation by early populations (Harris et al 2013 ). While the shorelines on the Atlantic and Gulf continental margins would not appear to have been favored settings for group rendezvous and aggregation during the Late Pleistocene, particularly during periods of peak shoreline change, this seems to have been less the case along the Atlantic than along the Gulf Coastal Plain, and only during some and not all periods.…”

“…Early hemispherical scale LCPA didn't consider topography on the continental shelf, primarily due to the coarse resolution of bathymetric data compared with terrestrial datasets then available, and the diffi culties of integrating the two , but such obstacles are rapidly disappearing (Anderson et al 2010bGillam et al 2006 ;Harris et al 2013 ). Knowing the topography of the exposed portions of the continental shelf in the Late Pleistocene, particularly in relation to where shorelines were located, will be critical to future LCPA analyses, both for the Late Pleistocene as well as for the exploration of earlier and later (i.e., Holocene) coastal settlement.…”

“…20,000 and 10,000 cal year BP (Anderson et al 2013 :190). The archaeological investigation of the submerged continental shelf has received increasing attention in recent decades, with particular attention directed to shorelines, river channel margins, scarps, and 76 chert sources (e.g., Dunbar 2006 ;Edwards and Emery 1977 ;Edwards and Merrill 1977 ;Emery and Edwards 1966 ;Faught 1996Faught , 2004aFaught and Donoghue 1997 ;Faught and Guisick 2011 ;Guisick and Faught 2011 ;Harris et al 2013 ;Holliday and Miller 2013 ;Lowery et al 2012 ;Stright 1990 ). Prehistoric sites have been found in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico along the paleo-Aucilla River channel, most in fairly shallow waters in areas submerged in the Holocene, although Paleoindian materials have been found on them (Faught 2004a , b ).…”