Plans and Profiles: Kieran Westley Researching Submerged Landscapes North of Ireland

Kieran Westley with a rather nice flint
blade found about 2m underwater
(photo taken by Wes Forysthe)

Kieran Westley is an archaeologist with the Environmental Sciences Research Institute at the University of Ulster who specializes in Maritime Archaeology, especially reconstructing and surveying submerged landscapes.  He completed a Post-Doc at Memorial University following the completion of his PhD at the University of Southampton.  No matter where you are in the world, the sea level has changed over time.  This change happens as the earth's crust moves up or down and water is added or removed to the world's oceans through melting or freezing of water in polar ice caps or continental ice sheets which causes coastlines to erode or be built up.  In Ireland, the earliest coastal sites have been inundated by rising relative sea level.  These are the sites that Kieran is looking for...

Plans and Profiles #14. Kieran Westley, Submerged Coastlines and Archaeological Sites north of Ireland

1) Tell me a little bit about your project.

Rough palaeo-geographic reconstruction showing the 

north of Ireland assuming a sea-level fall of -30m 

which could have taken place as early as 13,500 cal BP. 

The project involves attempting to identify, map, reconstruct and sample submerged archaeological landscapes in the north of Ireland. We're looking at submerged landscapes because sea-levels around Ireland were lower during its earliest known colonization - the early Mesolithic (dated to around 10-9500 cal BP). We know that these early colonists needed at least some sort of maritime adaptation to get to Ireland because the available sea-level evidence suggests that it was separated from mainland Britain at this time despite the lowered sea-level. In addition, worked flints have also been found on at least one outlying island which were also not connected to Ireland and hence would have needed watercraft to get there. However, probably due to sea-level rise, we have very little evidence of these coastal/maritime adaptations onshore, and therefore have to look for it offshore. An additional reason for researching these submerged landscapes relates to cultural resource management. We're seeing increasing development of the continental shelf; for example, cables, pipelines, offshore wind turbines etc. All of these activities have the potential to damage or destroy the undersea archaeological record. Therefore, in order to manage and protect these archaeologically important submerged landscapes, we need much more information on where they are located and preserved. In other parts of NW Europe, submerged landscapes are much better studied, for example in the Baltic and the North Sea; however, Ireland really remains a blank slate as far as this type of research goes.

Intertidal peat layer exposed on the beach at Portrush West Bay

The actual methodology involves two strands. Firstly, large-scale mapping and reconstruction of submerged landscapes using marine geophysical data. These include high resolution multibeam sonar systems which map seabed topography and substrate, and sub-bottom profiling systems which give acoustic cross-sections through the seabed allowing us to map buried layers. Secondly, a program of diver survey to ground-truth potential submerged landscape features, and identify archaeological remains.

So far, we’ve used the data to create rough approximations of palaeo-geography, and identify high potential areas where the palaeo-landscape has been preserved. These have formed the basis of our program of diver survey. Three main sites with palaeo-landscape evidence have been investigated so far. Firstly, a probable wave-cut rocky shoreline west of Ballycastle in c. 12 to 15m water depth. While features like this provide a nice indication that sea-levels were lower, they unfortunately can’t be dated directly. Secondly, a buried and submerged peat layer in the West Bay Portrush, in at least 3m water depth which extends off a thick layer of intertidal peat which is occasionally exposed when storms strip away the beach sand. We’ve traced this peat offshore with sub-bottom profile data and sampled it to get a date of c. 8900-9200 cal BP. Finally, another submerged peat (which has been dated 8700-9400 cal BP) and a small concentration of worked flints (which include distinctive early Irish Mesolithic forms) in c. 2-3m water depth are also under investigation. These come from two small adjacent bays (the flints in one and the peat in another) in Eleven Ballyboes townland, County Donegal. The bay with the flints has a collection of around 1500 water-rolled intertidal lithics amassed by a local collector, but the underwater finds we’ve made in the last year include much fresher examples and could therefore represent the remnants of an in situ source deposits More work confirming this and also investigating the submerged peat for palaeo-environmental and archaeological evidence will hopefully happen this coming summer.

Possible wave cut rocky shoreline at -13 to -15m depth west of Ballycastle (bathymetric data collected by the JIBS project, terrestrial aerial photo and DEM courtesy of LPS)

2) How did you become interested in this particular problem?

I've been interested in submerged landscapes since my undergrad days. What first piqued my interest was the colonization of the Americas involving the now submerged Beringian landbridge and the possible coastal route down the western coast of the US and Canada. Consequently, I went to Southampton University to do a masters and then PhD focusing on maritime archaeology and submerged landscapes. Most of my research since has therefore had some sort of a submerged landscapes component. The reason for looking at the north of Ireland is a little more pragmatic. Firstly, I got a job there (at the Centre for Maritime Archaeology, University of Ulster) and secondly, a very large quantity of seabed mapping data for the Irish coast was made available, giving archaeologists a chance to actually visualize the seabed in unprecedented detail.


3) Has your project changed since you originally began working on it? How?

Some of the intertidal lithics collected from Eleven Ballyboes

There have definitely been changes. When we started, it was intended that we would follow a nice 7 stage methodology devised by Trevor Bell at the MUN Geography Department. This essentially aimed to collect data on the seabed and sub-seabed, use this to create a detailed palaeo-landscape reconstruction and then apply predictive modelling of archaeological site locations to target ground-truth surveys. However, once we got going, we found that while the individual stages were great, sticking to a rigid structure was actually quite difficult, since some stages relied on data which was not available at the time, while we could make a head start on other stages where data was available. A good example of this is our work on the Eleven Ballyboes site – we targeted the site because it had lithics which appeared to be washing ashore and were therefore able to skip the predictive modelling stage.

This type of research is also massively interdisciplinary and really dependent on help from colleagues (most notably Ruth Plets, Rory Quinn and Peter Woodman, but also with help from individuals too numerous to mention). Dive surveys also require a team (thanks to Rory McNeary, Wes Forsythe, Colin Breen and the NERC Facility for Scientific Diving) and often boat support. It’s often the nature of research projects that people move on, get involved with other research projects or take on new jobs. For example, I personally had to put aspects of it on hold while I undertook research on the impact of coastal erosion on behalf of the Northern Ireland government heritage agency. Between this and my colleagues’ other commitments, the project has moved from a full time exercise to something a little more ad hoc, which is a shame, but is sometimes the reality of research.


4) If you had a time machine and could present your research to the people who lived at your site(s) – what would you hope their response would be?

Intertidal test pitting at Eleven Ballyboes  (or how many 

archaeologists does it take to dig a 1 x1…) 

(photo taken by Rory McNeary)

I’d hope that they’d be interested in how much the landscape was changing because of sea-level rise. It’d be really interesting to know the extent to which they actually perceived the change in sea-level and whether they thought it was a good or bad thing. Also, I would hope that they would then tell me where they’ve left all their coolest stuff.


5) Has your research taught you anything about yourself? What? 

That persistence pays off, and that you never know as much as you think - there’s always something more to learn.

Diver sampling the Portrush peat layer (buried under 

the sand) with a small hand core

6) I can’t imagine doing this research without...

Dive gear obviously and lots of lovely geophysical data.


7) How do you unwind when you need to get away from your research?

Beer, televised sport and Call of Duty on the Nintendo Wii (though not necessarily in that order).


8) Do you have any advice for students just starting out in Archaeology?

Archaeology is a tough field to stay in – take every opportunity you get to build up different skills and experience. You never know which might come in handy.

Sample of fresh lithics from underwater
versus water-rolled ones from the
intertidal beach. The fresh ones tend
to be grey or blue-grey, while the
rolled ones are patinated yellow, red,
orange or light grey.

9) What books or websites would you recommend if people want to learn more about your area of interest in general? Or your project in particular?

Our project has its own (infrequently updated) blog: Submergedlandscapes. This has lots more information on the project and the sites I mentioned earlier. More widely, SPLASH-COS (Submerged Prehistoric Landscapes and Archaeology of the Continental Shelf) is a Europe-wide networking project. There’s a webpage (http://www.splashcos.org/ ) and a Facebook Page . These have links to other projects including ongoing research and meetings. For the books – go for the recent volume Submerged Prehistory by Jonathan Benjamin et al. (2011). This is an edited volume with research papers from across the world. It’s a really nice introduction which showcases the breadth of current research in the field.

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Do you have research that you'd like to share with other arcaheologists or do you know a student or colleague whose work should be highlighted?  Send me an e-mail: elfshot.tim@gmail.com

Photo Credits: 

Kieran Westley, unless otherwise noted in the captions.
Plans and Profiles Banner, Tim Rast based on a linocut by Lori White

Plans and Profiles: Dominic Lacroix Researching Maritime Archaic Indian Landscapes and Collections

Dominic Lacroix visiting the
multi-component site of
Stock Cove, eastern Newfoundland
(photo by John Erwin 2010)

Dominic Lacroix is working towards a PhD in Archaeology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He's trying to make sense of the Maritime Archaic Indian presence in Newfoundland through the artifacts that they left behind and by reconstructing the landscape that they occupied.  Its cool work, and whenever Dominic speaks about his research I try to listen.  Now, after reading his responses to the Plans and Profiles questions, I look forward to reading about his efforts as well.  You don't have to be an archaeologist to appreciate Dominic's search for answers to his many questions about the Archaic period in Newfoundland, so pour yourself a coffee, get comfortable and enjoy...

Plans and Profiles #10. Dominic Lacroix, Maritime Archaic Indians in Newfoundland

1) Tell me a little bit about your project.

A variety of objects dating to the Archaic period from

 various regions of the island. (photo by Dominic Lacroix 2013)

My project focuses on the very first Newfoundlanders, a group of Amerindians we call the Maritime Archaic Indians (MAI) that settled and made the island of Newfoundland their home for thousands of years starting some 6000 years ago. Although a number of amazing sites dating to this time period have been excavated on the island, we actually know very little about these people in contrast to other groups that have since followed in their footsteps. Through my research, I’m attempting to flesh out our understanding of what it was like to live on the island of Newfoundland so long ago, in a world very different from our own. To do so, I blend artifact analyses with historical and palaeoenvironmental data, and computer models to explore notions of group identity, homeland, mobility, and interaction amongst various Archaic communities. In contrast to other Archaeologists you’ve featured so far in your Plans and Profiles, my project does not rely on an excavation program. Instead of focussing on a single site, I’m interested in the big picture, landscape patterns present at the scale of the entire island. So for my project, I’m relying on data that already exists, whether it is to be found in digital form, in historical records, or as items now curated in various local, provincial, and federal collections.

An important aspect of looking at the big picture is putting all the information we have in its proper historical and cultural context. One factor strongly affecting our understanding of the Archaic is sea-level change, which has had a dramatic impact on certain coastal regions of Newfoundland over the last 6000 years. To use an example right out of Tim’s MA thesis, the sea has risen by more than 10 m along the south coast since the Archaic. The coastal landscape people would have inhabited in this region is now almost completely submerged, except for high points which are now islands. In contrast, the Northern Peninsula has been rising out of the sea over this same period, so Archaic coastal sites in this region are now hundreds of metres inland, like the Archaic sites from Bird Cove that have already been featured in this blog. As a result of these changes, the location of a site today may be extremely different from the location that was selected by the families who occupied it so long ago. By incorporating palaeoenvironmental data, including records of sea-level change, the physical landscape inhabited by these people can be reconstructed using computer models and a bit of imagination.

Interactive 360 degree panorama showing the major
landscape features surrounding the site of
Stock Cove in eastern Newfoundland.
(panorama by Dominic Lacroix 2010)

However, working with sea-level alone only tells us about the places people inhabited, not the people themselves. These reconstructed environments must be placed into their proper cultural context, as far as it can be inferred from the practices of those who inhabited them. These practices include things like technology, foodways, campsite selection, burial rituals, and travel. Technology is an integral part of people’s identity and tools can tell us many things about the people who left them behind. Tools are part of our daily life. They are extensions of our body and, as such, make various statements as to the type of person we are. Just think of people using a Mac instead of a PC, or having a set of chopsticks instead of a fork as their main table utensil. Artifact collections allow me to look at the similarity and differences between large numbers of tools people have made and used across vast regions. They provide an important background from which to compare human-tool relationships between various regions. Food is another aspect of daily life to which we identify strongly. It also tends to be very culturally specific and is usually linked to a variety of social rules. Think how uncomfortable you may have felt the last time you were placed in front of a new food, especially if it came without instructions on how to proceed. I’m using the various food opportunities that different regions of the island offered to explore the variety of foodways that may have been present in each region. Home is where we choose to live, and how we connect with these particular places is also an integral aspect of who people are, so the way Archaic families chose specific places to inhabit and the way they interacted with these places is yet another source of information I am exploring. Death can be a difficult transition to deal with. The loss of loved ones, old or young, changes our lives. How people approached this important transition during the Archaic and the way they interacted with their departed ancestors is another important aspect of my research. Movement is also something we do every day and impacts where we get things and how we keep in touch with others. Since Newfoundland is an island, I’m exploring how this would have impacted families moving across the Island itself and to adjoining mainland regions when all they had was their feet and people-powered watercraft.

Circular panorama showing the major landscape features surrounding the site of Stock Cove in eastern Newfoundland. This is a 2D image of the interactive Quicktime panorama above. Click to Enlarge.  (panorama by Dominic Lacroix 2010)

2) How did you become interested in this particular problem?

Ever since I took an undergraduate course on the Archaeology of Eastern North America at the University of Calgary, I’ve been fascinated by the impact sea-level change has had on our collective cultural heritage. Throughout the majority of human history, global sea-levels have been on average 40 to 60 m lower than they are today! In places along the Atlantic seaboard of North America, as elsewhere in the world, this can translate into many kilometres of submerged landscapes, one example being that coastal places that were inhabited during these periods are now underwater. Until a few decades ago, it was generally believed that coastal resources only begun to be a major source of human focus roughly 5000–7000 years ago, as evidenced by a sudden worldwide increase in the number of sites with a clear coastal focus. We now know that this actually corresponds to the period when sea-levels began to stabilize near their current position. These observations have remained in the back of my head ever since, waiting to materialize in the form of a great research project.

I actually selected the topic of my MA with the purpose of gaining invaluable experience in interpreting geophysical data, an important skill for submerged archaeological landscape research. For my PhD, I wanted to combine my new interpretive skills to a context that involved sea-level change. Parks Canada has been involved in very interesting work incorporating sea-level change into our understanding of the early history of the West Coast for a few decades already, but in eastern Canada few projects have combined modern ocean mapping technologies to archaeological knowledge in order to gain a better understanding of the landscapes inhabited by our earliest predecessors. Archaic Newfoundland seemed like a perfect case study to reflect on the impact of sea-level change on archaeological preservation and site visibility, as well as the effects such coastal changes would have had on the lifeways of those who experienced it first hand.

Dramatic changes in landscapes due to sea-level change. This is Atlantic Canada around 8000 years ago, roughly the age of the oldest Archaic sites in Labrador. PEI is part of the mainland, the Magdalen Islands are quite large, and areas of the offshore banks are dry land. Newfoundland’s west coast is highly indented, with other important changes at a more local scale. (image by Dominic Lacroix 2012)

3) Has your project changed since you originally began working on it? How?

Most definitely yes! In all fairness, when I began this project I only had a very fuzzy idea of what I wanted to do other than to somehow blend sea-level change with people. As I became more accustomed to the models used to describe the Maritime Archaic period, I began to realise how the type of research I wanted to do could be used to answer new questions about these people. In Newfoundland, interpretations originally proposed for a few well-excavated sites have often been recycled and applied everywhere on the island, often without proper justifications, leaving us with very limited and sometime simplistic ideas about how Archaic people lived on the island. By taking a landscape approach and looking at the big picture, it allows me to see varying patterns of landscape use at a regional scale. This gives me the opportunity to test if things were done differently in different regions and better positions me to understand the regional context of any given site, without having to over-stretch my interpretations. So my project rapidly began to expand (perhaps too much according to my supervisors!) from a fuzzy blend of sea-level and people to incorporate more recent social theory, and integrate sea-level change with other forms of landscape patterns, like the type of relationships people had with their food, their ancestors, their places, and their routes of movement. As a result I’m now able to target questions that had previously been neglected to flesh out aspects of life during the Archaic.

Dominic conducting a ground-penetrating radar survey at the
site of Point Riche, northwestern Newfoundland.
(photo by Rob Anstey 2010)

Just like Mike Parker Pearson mentioned with regards to the Stonehenge Riverside Project, the changes to my project didn’t come all at once, and I think this is true of most projects. They were gradually incorporated as I stumbled into some new observation that raised a number of new questions. In order to do any form of submerged landscape archaeology, you need a cultural context in which to place the landforms you are studying. This context is currently very thin for Archaic Newfoundland. One of the first things I did was to visit a large number of sites to get a better ‘feel’ for their location and better understand how the model of site location developed by my two co-supervisors, Trevor Bell and Priscilla Renouf , actually translates itself on the ground. During these visits, I realised that Archaic families from different region of the island seemed to bury their dead differently. The importance of this particular observation was actually pointed out to me by a colleague after a presentation I gave at a conference (Thanks Chris Wolff!). I then realised this pattern extended to adjoining mainland regions of the Maritimes and Labrador. While going through the literature on the Archaic, I started noticing that certain types of objects also tended to be concentrated in certain regions of the Island, regions that roughly overlapped with the two separate burial patterns I had already observed. This is when I began to realise that Newfoundland was likely shared by more that one group, and that although they were closely related to each other and adjoining mainland groups, they did things their own way. If all the worldviews of these groups were slowly morphing into each other from northern Labrador to New England, this means that people had to stay in touch, even if infrequently. Because Newfoundland is an island, this turned my attention to seafaring and the skills involved in maintaining these networks of relations. While looking at artifacts, I also became aware that some of the most unusual material came from interior regions. This got me to look more closely into the vast landscapes of interior Newfoundland. Even if people focussed their living on the coast, the interior would have played an important role as a travel corridor between various coastal regions of the island. Finally, a paper written by my co-supervisors suggested that a link may also have been present between resource concentrations and site locations during the Archaic. This led me to include foodways into my research in order to compare how regional patterns of food procurement interplayed with my other observations. So my project has progressively increased in complexity to better explore how the first Newfoundlanders interacted with their close and distant kin, their ancestors, their homeland, the sea, and how climate change impacted their lives.

4) What’s the one question about your research that you never want to hear again?

Humm, I don’t think there is one! I like chatting about my project and each person I talk to seems to take something a little different from my research, depending on what their particular interests are, which often leads to very different types of question. I think the one question I maybe get the most is not really related to my project at all. On hearing that I used to be an engineer, people want to know why I switched to archaeology. I have all sorts of ideas as to where my burgeoning interest in archaeology came from (see below), but really, the switch just felt right. I have never regretted it.

5) Has your research taught you anything about yourself? What?

Dominic, in company of Dominique Lavers at Point Riche, 

northwestern Newfoundland. 

(Port au Choix Archaeology Project Photo 2010)

By looking into various aspect of people’s life in the past, I couldn’t help but to analyse my own life and dwell further into what makes us humans. I have become increasingly aware of my own connections with the world, from the particular experiences, feelings and memories tied to my landscape, to the particular flukes of history that brought me to where I am today, and even to the way the food and the products I routinely use are made and arrive at my house. Through this constant dialogue between past and present, I have learnt to apply my own brand of critical thinking to all sorts of information, archaeological or not, and, as a result, I have become progressively more critical of the way we do certain things today. Our ‘modern’ society has adopted a very special and detached view of the world we inhabit, a way of seeing things that has come to artificially separate us from and put us above the world we inhabit. The more I think about the past, the more I realise how connected everything truly is and that we need to rethink, as a society, how we approach a number of things. As feedback into my own research, I now realise that even simple questions cannot be explored without having to follow connections into multiple directions, and that, however much data we may have, we’ll only ever expose part of the story. I now see my job as an archaeologist as presenting the glimpses of our shared heritage I have uncovered to the public and use those to nudge people into rethinking some of the assumptions and the pre-conceived ideas that remain an integral part of our modern identity.

6) Why did you choose MUN?

Given the particular blend of ocean mapping technologies and archaeology I was looking for in a PhD project, very few places in Canada were able to match what MUN had to offer. The Department of Geography is a leader in coastal geomorphology and marine habitat mapping which offered the expertise and access to data required for the more technical aspect of my research. The Department of Archaeology is a leader in North Atlantic archaeology. But, when it really comes down to it, it is my two co-supervisors, Trevor Bell and Priscilla Renouf who really tipped the balance for me. I knew of Trevor through a few scholars from Ireland I had been in touch with. They were part of the Submerged Landscape Archaeological Network (SLAN), which Trevor was instrumental in creating. This network brings together researchers in academia and government agencies from both sides of the North Atlantic with expertise linked to submerged landscape archaeology. In turn, Trevor put me in touch with Priscilla. The two of them had already been working together on a number of projects that combined archaeological site location with sea-level change. The more I talked to and read about them and their research, the more excited I became with the idea of collaborating with such amazing people. Plus St. John’s and Newfoundland are such beautiful places that after our first visit to the Island, my wife and I fell in love with this place, it felt like home, so the choice was an easy one!

7) How do you unwind when you need to get away from your research?

I like how you use the word unwind, because you can never really get away entirely from your research. As Patty Wells was mentioning in her profile, even when she drives around she can’t help but keeping an eye out for things that relate to her research. I think this is especially true when you study people and their landscape and all you do in your own life is interacting with other people and your surroundings! For me, it seems that some of my best thinking occurs when I’m not focusing on a task directly related to my project, like shovelling my car out of a snow bank. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately! However, I find that putting my research in the background is quite easy these days. I have young children that are extremely good at making sure they remain the centre of my attention as soon as I’m in the room, so as soon as I get home, I’m taken to a fantastic world filled with princesses, pirates, fairies, and knights, quite removed from my own work! I also love to cook, or just sit back and read or watch interesting stories, real or not.

8) When did you realize that you might be an archaeologist?

Dominic recording an Inuit sodhouse’s architecture in 3D at 

the site of Guukbuuq, Northwest Territories. 

(photo by Charles Arnold 2007)

Let’s face it, what kid wouldn’t like to be able to search for ‘treasures’ in the sand for a living! However, I don’t think I ever woke up one day and suddenly decided I wanted to be an archaeologist. For me, it has been a long a gradual process, the culmination of a number of experiences spanning many decades. The earliest experience I can recall which stirred my interest about old things buried in the ground was finding an old toy truck while helping my dad work in our garden. I remember how strange it felt to hold something somebody had lost years before and wondering how it might have got to the place where we found it. Later, my brother and I also kept finding all sorts of things (e.g., a watch, old shoes, metal utensils) while swimming in the river in front of our cottage, where we spent most of our childhood summers. Meanwhile, I got really interested in ancient societies as a result of my TV education. As a kid during the 80s, I was watching this weekly cartoon called “Les Merveilleuses Cités d’Or,” which took place during the ‘discovery’ of the Americas. Although the plot line had absolutely no basis in reality, it was always followed by a short documentary on the real places, people and things we had seen in the episode, from Machu Picchu to Teotihuacán. This is what got me to begin reading about amazing things groups like the Mayas and the Incas had accomplished without the help of power tools! My interest in other cultures continued to expand from there and many years later I found myself in Southeast Asia and then in the Ecuadorian Andes towards the end of my undergrad degree. I remember getting shocked (in a good way) constantly by things I witnessed and this really got me thinking about how different communities around the world can do things very differently based on their people’s history. Then I got to learn more about archaeology through an Egyptologist I met while living in Toronto. This got me really interested in this profession. At the time I was working towards a master’s degree in aerospace engineering and, after hopping through some hoops, I was granted permission to take an out-of-program undergraduate introductory course in anthropology. I loved it so much I decided then and there that I was going to become a shovel bum on archaeological digs once I retired from engineering. Fast forward a few years and I’m in South Korea teaching English in a Middle School (Junior High) for a year, surrounded by amazing archaeological sites, and needing to figure out what I was going to do when I got back to Canada. My wife and I decided to move back to her hometown, Calgary, where one of the largest archaeology department in Canada is located. Once we were settled, I decided to retire from engineering early, enrolled at the University of Calgary, and began my training as an archaeologist. The rest is history.

9) What books or websites would you recommend if people want to learn more about your area of interest in general? Or your project in particular?

For people interested in the Archaic period of Newfoundland, I strongly recommend Jim Tuck’s 1976 Ancient People of Port au Choix (published by Memorial University) is an insightful yet extremely approachable book on the excavation of one of the largest Archaic burial grounds in the Northeast. It offers very intriguing glimpses into various aspect of the life of the people who buried their friends and family in Port au Choix over 4000 years ago. It’s accompanied by beautiful pictures and drawings (if you can, get a hold of one of the original prints, the reprints just don’t do justice to the images), and remains unmatched for anything relating to this time period of Newfoundland, although a few chapters of Priscilla Renouf’s new edited volume The Cultural Landscapes of Port au Choix (published by Springer, 2011) add new interesting dimensions to the topic. For a quick source of information, The Rooms (Newfoundland’s provincial museum, archive and gallery) has a great overview of the Maritime Archaic, as does Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage, both written by Tuck. Newfoundland’s Provincial Archaeology Office also maintains a blog that has multiple interesting entries relating to the Archaic period.

For those interested in an exiting introduction to the possibilities of submerged landscape archaeology, I’d point them towards Europe's Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland by Vince Gaffney and two of his colleagues (published by the Council for British Archaeology, 2009). It presents, in an approachable format, research relating to the vast regions of the North Sea that connected England to the European mainland until the early Mesolithic. For archaeologists looking to go further into this subjects, I’d suggest taking a look at the book Submerged Prehistory edited by Jonathan Benjamin and three of his colleagues (published by Oxbow Books, 2011). This one presents the results of a variety of recent research projects from around the world. The SLAN, of which I’m part, produces an online newsletter discussing our most recent endeavours and links to our publications.

For recent research done in Canadian waters, the volume entitled Haida Gwaii: Human History and Environment from the Time of Loon to the Time of the Iron People, edited by Daryl Fedje and Rolf W. Mathewes (published by UBC Press, 2005), is a wonderful example of submerged landscape archaeology. Parks Canada’s website also has multiple links to various research programs linked to underwater archaeology particularly and our National Marine Conservation Areas more generally.

My own research in just on the verge of beginning to be published so interested readers will have to be patient… any updates will be posted to my Academia.edu page.

Finally, visiting the various links provided throughout the text, many produced by Elfshot!

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Would you like to see your work profiled here or the work of one of your colleagues or students?  Send me a note and I'll send you some questions. elfshot.tim@gmail.com

Photo Credits: As noted in photo captions

Rising Sea Levels on Google Earth for Archaeologists

Link to Google Earth Gadget

I found this handy Google Earth gadget by Zoltán Büki that can be used to show the effects of rising sea level for any coastline in the world; Rising Sea Level Animation.  Its meant to show the effects of rising sea level from melting polar ice, but in the parts of the world that have experienced falling relative sea levels since the end of the last ice age, like much of northern Canada, it can be used to reconstruct past shorelines.

The pink overlay is the coastline 4 meters higher than present. I'm trying to show that Maritime Archaic Indian sites located in the red circle in the middle of the map would have been on an island when they were occupied 4500-3400 B.P.

Its simple to use and its accuracy seems fairly sharp, especially if you are looking at an area with hi resolution Google Earth coverage and a relatively simple coastline.  When you first download it, by clicking on the "Open in Google Earth" link, it is set up to run as an animation, but each frame is a layer showing the coastline in 1 m intervals from 1 masl to 100 masl.  If you don't have Google Earth, it will help you download and install it.  Once its downloaded and the Google Earth program has opened, check your side bar and look in this folder;

• Temporary Places 
• > Rising Sea Level Animation 
• >> Changing Sea Level by 1 m by BZoltan Hungary 
• >>> Data 1-100m

Google Earth Sidebar

Unclick the check box in front of the "Data 1-100m" folder.  Then you can click each layer individually.  I'm interested in mapping the coastline around some Maritime Archaic Indian sites at Bird Cove on Newfoundland's Northern Peninsula.  They were occupied when sea level was 4-5 meters higher than it is today, so by clicking those layers on one at a time, I can get a quick glimpse of the Maritime Archaic Indian coastline.  The app doesn't tell you what past sea levels were, so if you are going to look at it to reconstruct ancient coastlines, you would need to know the rate of emergence for the area that you are interested in.

Each level in the application is a sphere wrapping around the entire globe.  The lowest level is a sphere 1 metre higher than present sea level and the largest sphere is 100 metres higher, so it allows you to visualize coastlines anywhere from 1m to 100m higher than present.  Unfortunately, it doesn't help with lowering sea levels and mapping coastlines that were lower than present.  The default colour of the spheres is pink.  I'd love to be able to change that if some knows what button to click.
 

The same area, using Canadian Digital Elevation Data from Toporama.  I think the shape of this Island (with the red circle) is more correct than the one generated by Google Earth, although it took a little more work to make this map.

For comparison, the map above is one I made of the same area using the Canadian Digital Elevation Data available on Toporama.  I traced the 4 meter contour interval by hand on screen to make this map.  There's a little bit of labour involved, but I couldn't do it automatically because the part of the map that I'm most interested in connects the ocean coastline to a freshwater pond to create an island.  Incorporating freshwater features into sea level models is something that these programs seem to have trouble doing on their own.  I feel a little more confident about the results from the Toporama map, because it matches my memory of the actual lay of the land a little better.  For this map, I'm trying to illustrate how Maritime Archaic sites located in the red circle would have actually been sitting on a small island when they were occupied.  Today they are on the mainland.  Generally, both maps illustrate that point, although the Google Earth app distorts the shape of the island a bit.  Interestingly, the maps generated in Google Earth for 2-3m above sea level match the 4m map from Toporama more closely than the 4m map it produced.  If Toporama and Google Earth are out of sync by 1 or 2 metres, but otherwise the same, then it might just be that they use a slightly different definition of sea level.

Edit: I forgot to mention - you can improve the results of the Google Earth gadget by opening Tools >> Options and dragging the Terrain Quality slider all the way to the right to create higher terrain quality.  Also, you can try increasing the Elevation Exaggeration in the same window.

Photo Credits:
1-3,5: screen grabs from Google Earth.
4: map based on data from Toporama.