Recent Progress, Trends, and Developments in Island and Coastal Archaeology

Abstract

In the first issue of the Journal of Island & Coastal Archaeology published 10 years ago, Erlandson and Fitzpatrick (2006) outlined eight topics which demonstrated why island and coastal archaeology were relevant to understanding a host of issues related to human cultural and biological evolution across time and space. Here, we evaluate recent trends and developments in island and coastal archaeology and discuss how research over the last decade has changed and continued to illuminate the antiquity of maritime adaptations, human dispersals, historical ecology, and many other issues on a global scale. With rising seas and marine erosion threatening island and coastal archaeological sites around the world, archaeologists face urgent challenges in the coming decades as we continue to promote research and conservation of the global island and coastal archaeological record.There are times when the ocean is not the ocean-not blue, not even water, but some violent explosion of energy and danger: ferocity on a scale only gods can summon. It hurls itself at the island, sending spray

Marginalization of the Margins: The Importance of Smaller Islands in Human Prehistory

“…Because of this provincial, inward-looking perspective, case studies from the American Southeast have largely been absent from broader discussions of island and coastal archaeology. This, however, is changing (see Fitzpatrick et al 2015;Thomas 2008aThomas , 2008bThomas , 2008cThompson and Thomas 2013;Thompson and Worth 2011).…”

Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene fishing strategies at Quebrada Jaguay and the Ring Site, southern Perú

“…Decades later much of the archaeological research in coastal regions of the world continues to be either based on assumptions voiced by Binford or responses to them (e.g., Bicho et al, 2011;Des Lauriers, 2006;Dillehay, 2000;Erlandson, 2015;Erlandson and Fitzpatrick, 2006;Erlandson and Jew, 2009;Erlandson et al, 2008;Fitzpatrick et al, 2015;Mitchell et al, 2015;Moss, 2012, among others). These assumptions might be paraphrased as: most people did not use coastal resources; human populations using coastal resources were small and mobile because coastal resources were unproductive; coastal sites were extractive camps temporarily occupied as part of an inland/coastal seasonal round; extractive technologies were simple and required little skill or knowledge; the most valued coastal resources were salt and mollusc shells; hunting, and eventually farming, were superior subsistence pursuits.…”

“…This debate focusses on immigration routes into North America: broadly considered in terms of either a terrestrial route through an unglaciated, ice-free corridor in the Northern Hemisphere or a coastal route along the Pacific Rim (e.g., Davis, 2011;Fitzpatrick et al, 2015). Until very recently it was assumed that people could not move south of Beringia until continental glaciers retreated sufficiently for the rest of the hemisphere to be accessed.…”

Physical sedimentary controls on subtropical coastal and shelf sedimentary systems: Initial application in conceptual models and computer visualizations to support archaeology

“…Conceptual models formed for archaeological purposes will be most useful when founded on realistic processes of coastal sedimentary evolution, and on thorough on-site investigations (e.g., Inda, del Puerto, Capdepont, & Bracco, 2017) that enable researchers to test, advance or reject these models. It is important to consider the nature of the coastal sedimentary environments involved because of their capacity to (a) provide different resources (economic and utilitarian, Bailey & Parkington, 1988;Fitzpatrick, Rick, & Erlandson, 2015), (b) drive different technological developments (e.g., fishing technologies, Colaninno, 2015;Dortch, 1997), and (c) impact archaeological site preservation (Tveskov & Erlandson, 2003;Ward & Larcombe, 2008;Ward et al, 2015). In this paper, we hope to improve matters by promoting a process-based geoarchaeological approach.…”