“… It seems that underwater finds…are held to a different standard of reporting and context, simply for being underwater . (Lemke, 2021, p. 12)…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…This assessment The absence of documented underwater sites on Australia's continental shelf means that there is considerable impetus to be the first to find and publish on the first or 'oldest' marine cultural site (Wallis, 2020). That such lithic artefacts can survive and can be found in the marine environment is not a new finding and, in our view, it does not really matter whether a site is supratidal, intertidal, subtidal or fully marine, but rather what contribution it makes to archaeological understanding (see also Lemke, 2021) and how that understanding might be modified by past or present site-formation processes (Ward et al, 2015(Ward et al, , 1999; see also Shackley, 1978).…”
“…This is an exciting time for submerged prehistoric archaeology (Lemke, 2021), with significant growth in awareness, research and associated publications and an ever‐increasing number of underwater finds, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere. The increased potential for understanding the origins of human culture, global human expansion, early coastal adaptations and early seafaring is becoming evident (see Bailey et al, 2020; Evans et al, 2014; Harff et al, 2015 and references therein) as well as how these studies might aid the location and discovery of submerged prehistoric sites (e.g., Bailey & Cawthra, 2021; Faught & Smith, 2021; Flemming, 2021; O'Shea, 2021).…”
The absence of known prehistoric underwater cultural heritage (UCH) sites on the Australian inner shelf stands in stark contrast to the thousands of sites revealed elsewhere in the world. Two recent claims—Dortch et al. (D2019) and Benjamin et al. (B2020)—put forward the first in situ (i.e., primary context) UCH sites in the shallow waters of the Dampier Archipelago, North West Australia, each arguing that the stone artefact scatters are at least 7000 years old and are now submerged because of postglacial sea‐level rise. We present new hydrodynamic modelling and data on coastal erosion and bathymetry, and reassess each site's sedimentary setting and archaeological site‐formation history. D2019 and B2020 clearly present lithic cultural artefacts, but the arguments for their sites being of primary context and reflecting early Holocene land surfaces are mistaken. Rather, these sites occur in the intertidal zone, and many or all artefacts are likely to have been reworked. Sites of secondary context, if treated appropriately, can inform our understanding of site‐formation process and change, and may support more powerful contributions to submerged archaeology than attempts to seek the first or the oldest.
“… It seems that underwater finds…are held to a different standard of reporting and context, simply for being underwater . (Lemke, 2021, p. 12)…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…This assessment The absence of documented underwater sites on Australia's continental shelf means that there is considerable impetus to be the first to find and publish on the first or 'oldest' marine cultural site (Wallis, 2020). That such lithic artefacts can survive and can be found in the marine environment is not a new finding and, in our view, it does not really matter whether a site is supratidal, intertidal, subtidal or fully marine, but rather what contribution it makes to archaeological understanding (see also Lemke, 2021) and how that understanding might be modified by past or present site-formation processes (Ward et al, 2015(Ward et al, , 1999; see also Shackley, 1978).…”
“…This is an exciting time for submerged prehistoric archaeology (Lemke, 2021), with significant growth in awareness, research and associated publications and an ever‐increasing number of underwater finds, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere. The increased potential for understanding the origins of human culture, global human expansion, early coastal adaptations and early seafaring is becoming evident (see Bailey et al, 2020; Evans et al, 2014; Harff et al, 2015 and references therein) as well as how these studies might aid the location and discovery of submerged prehistoric sites (e.g., Bailey & Cawthra, 2021; Faught & Smith, 2021; Flemming, 2021; O'Shea, 2021).…”
The absence of known prehistoric underwater cultural heritage (UCH) sites on the Australian inner shelf stands in stark contrast to the thousands of sites revealed elsewhere in the world. Two recent claims—Dortch et al. (D2019) and Benjamin et al. (B2020)—put forward the first in situ (i.e., primary context) UCH sites in the shallow waters of the Dampier Archipelago, North West Australia, each arguing that the stone artefact scatters are at least 7000 years old and are now submerged because of postglacial sea‐level rise. We present new hydrodynamic modelling and data on coastal erosion and bathymetry, and reassess each site's sedimentary setting and archaeological site‐formation history. D2019 and B2020 clearly present lithic cultural artefacts, but the arguments for their sites being of primary context and reflecting early Holocene land surfaces are mistaken. Rather, these sites occur in the intertidal zone, and many or all artefacts are likely to have been reworked. Sites of secondary context, if treated appropriately, can inform our understanding of site‐formation process and change, and may support more powerful contributions to submerged archaeology than attempts to seek the first or the oldest.
“…Research on the archaeology of underwater landscapes has had to fight for many decades against a prevailing skepticism that nothing worthwhile is likely to have survived and that investigating the cultural heritage of submerged landscapes is a waste of resources that could be better devoted to projects elsewhere. This skepticism often takes the form of demands for standards of proof and justification that would not be applied in other branches of archaeology and continues to be articulated by armchair critics ignorant of recent developments in the field (see, e.g., Bailey, 2014;Lemke, 2021aLemke, , 2021b. In their attempts at a wholesale dismissal of our field investigations and interpretations, based on extremely weak scientific foundations, Ward et al inevitably provide fuel for those who believe that this type of underwater research is a waste of time and money and should not be funded.…”
Ward et al. (2022) assert in their desktop study that we are "mistaken" in our interpretation of the artifacts at the Cape Bruguières Channel (CBC), Flying Foam Passage (FF), and Dolphin Island (DI) sites as evidence of cultural activity on a pre-inundation land surface (Benjamin et al., 2020 [CBC and FF]; Dortch et al., 2019 [DI]) and that we have failed to take account of local hydrodynamic processes that could have displaced artifacts and moved them over much greater distances than we thought possible. They argue two key points in support: (1) that "these sites are in the intertidal zone" (p. 783) and (2) that "many or all artefacts are likely to have been reworked" (p. 783).
| SUPPORTING DATA SETSWard et al. have relied on a hydrodynamic model with a parent 2500 m grid and a smaller nested 500 m grid (Ward et al. supplementary information). From this, they have derived modeled current movements at peak ebb and flood tides and generated a range of hypotheses of possible artifact movement in response to these current flows. They do not model currents at the seabed nor provide a justification for their bed roughness value of 0.0002 m. The smaller 500 m grid is almost five times larger than the width of the CBC reported in Benjamin et al., so there is no way this model could accurately represent current speeds in CBC, yet they still incorporate a grid cell over this site and model the current speed. The DI site reported in Dortch et al. is located within a shallow embayment on the eastern side of the FF and is not even captured in their grid. Large reef areas across the northern archipelago (immediately adjacent to CBC) are also completely unsurveyed. Nevertheless, this area is incorporated into the grid mesh. In their supplementary information, they also refer to RPS data with measured cyclonic current speeds that exceed 2 m/s on the North West Shelf. They do not provide a location for this measurement. Given that the North West Shelf covers an area of over 200,000 km 2 with tidal ranges of more than 10 m in the north, we question how this value is even remotely relevant to the Murujuga sites. It is axiomatic in geoarchaeological studies of underwater archaeological sites that the local conditions most relevant to archaeological site formation and deformation processes can vary over distances of as little as 10 s or 100 s of meters. The model proposed by Ward et al. is too coarse to be useful in contradicting our LETTER TO THE EDITORS
“…I see this greater sense of possibility, for instance, in the scholarship of those who have sought evidence for First Peoples beneath oceans, lakes, and rivers. Examples include the work of Quentin Mackie and colleagues in the Pacific Northwest (e.g., Mackie et al 2013); Dennis Stanford and colleagues (2014) in and along Chesapeake Bay; John O'Shea, Ashley Lemke, and others in Lake Huron (Lemke 2020; O'Shea et al 2014); and Jessie Halligan and others (2016) in Florida's Aucilla River.…”
Section: Rehumanizing Pleistocene People Of the Western Hemisphere (T...mentioning
Since the emergence of the niche in Folsom, New Mexico, in the late 1920s, peopling archaeology has sought to understand the earliest human occupants of the Western Hemisphere. Three generations of practitioners have made great strides in the techno-environmental arena. However, we have largely failed to tap into PaleoIndigenous intellectual, emotional, and social lives—the very domains that made Ice Age people as fully human as we are. As a result, our interpretations of those pioneering populations could often apply as readily to a colony of ants or a herd of wildebeest as they do to living, breathing, thinking, dreaming, loving, striving human ancestors. This article first explores the reasons for our failure to fully actualize First Peoples, identifying and implicating a feedback loop that includes practitioner homogeneity (we have always been and continue to be disproportionately white men of European descent); our predominantly positivist worldview; our language, training, and practice; and even the limited nature of the material record we study. This article also, however, highlights the ways that an important minority of peopling scholars have sought to access the humanity of PaleoIndigenous people. By more consistently mobilizing our own human capacity to creatively interrogate the deep past, we will produce scholarship that more consistently recognizes the capacity of the people who lived it and, just as importantly, respects those living today.
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