Full Description
This volume, the result of an International Conference on Wet Site Archaeology funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, explores the rewards and responsibilities of recovering unique assemblages from water-saturated deposits. Characteristics common to all archaeological wet sites are identified from Newfoundland to Chile, Polynesia to Florida, and from the Late Pleistocene to the Twentieth Century. Topics include innovative excavation and preservation methods; the need for adequate funding to preserve and analyze the abundant biological and cultural remains recovered only at archaeological wet sites; expanded knowledge of past environments, subsistence, technologies, artistic expressions, skeletal structure, and pathologies; the urgency to inform developers and governmental bodies about the invisible heritage entombed in wetlands that is often destroyed before it can be investigated; a formula for establishing priorities for excavating wet sites; and how to determine when enough of a wet site has been sampled.Many famous sites and discoveries are described in this volume, including Herculaneum, Hoko River, Hontoon Island, Key Marco, Monte Verde, Ozette, Somerset Levels, Windover, bog bodies of Northern Europe, and lake dwellers of Switzerland. Professional and amateur archaeologists, as well as anyone interested in archaeology or the significance of wet site archaeology will find this book fascinating.
Contents
1. A Wetland Perspective 2. Problems and Responsibilities in the Excavation of Wet Sites 3. Recent Archaeological Discoveries in Lake Neuchatel, Switzerland: From the Paleolithic to the Middle Ages 4. The Peat Hag 5. The Location and Assessment of Underwater Archaeological Sites 6. New Applications of Remote Sensing: Geophysical Prospection for Underwater Archaeological Sites in Switzerland 7. The Somerset Levels: Multidisciplinary Investigations and a Wealth of Results 8. Wet Sites Archaeology at Red Bay, Labrador 9. A Waterlogged Site on Huahine Island, French Polynesia 10. The Significance of the 3000 B. P. Hoko River Waterlogged Fishing Camp in Our Understanding of Southern Northwest Coast Cultural Evolution 11. Research Design and Wet Site Archaeology in the Netherlands: An Example 12. Early Rainforest Archaeology in Southwestern South America: Research Context, Design and Data at Monte Verde 13. The Skeletons of Herculaneum, Italy 14. An Assembly of Death: Bog Bodies of Northern and Western Europe 15. Treatment of Waterlogged Wood 16. Marco's Buried Treasure: Wetlands Archaeology and Adventure in Nineteenth Century Florida 17. Multidisciplinary Investigations at the Windover Site 18. Settlement, Subsistence and Environment: Aspects of Cultural Development Within the Wetlands of East-Central Florida 19. Environments of Florida in the Late Wisconsin and Holocene 20. Archaeological Wet Sites: Untapped Archives of Prehistoric Documents
