Uncovering Submerged Landscapes

Early peoples migrating to the Americas via the coastal migration route would have travelled through southeast Alaska during periods with lower sea levels. The residues of where they lived, hunted and gathered are on the now submerged continental shelf of southeast Alaska. A GIS model, two years of marine geophysical survey (including side scan sonar, sub-bottom profiling and multibeam sonar) and minimal subsurface testing have allowed the author to refine the methods for locating submerged archaeological sites buried on the continental shelf. The environment is reconstructed in 500-year intervals, and these intervals are used to create a predictive model for each time period using inductive and deductive methods. The final model combines the interval models for a final prediction of probable archaeological sites within the region.