The archaeology of submerged prehistoric sites on the North Pacific Coast of North America

Abstract

We review the history of underwater archaeological investigations of submerged prehistoric remains on the North Pacific Coast of North America, divided into three phases: Phase 1 (1960s–1981) – hypotheses and “wet-site archaeology”; Phase 2 (1981–1994) – operationalized scuba explorations of submerged anchor stone accumulations and the Montague Harbour Underwater Archaeology Project; and Phase 3 (1995–present) – refined modeling of regional sea beds for areas of high archaeological potential on submerged relict shorelines with limited testing and identification of late Pleistocene and early Holocene archaeological deposits on near-shore intertidal and interior upland strandlines. The latter part of Phase 3 also saw the potential for submerged prehistoric cultural resources integrated into consideration of development project assessments. Finally, the Coastal Migration Route for early migration to the Americas shifted from a peripheral proposition to a central complimentary paradigm. These multiple streams of theory, modeling, and pragmatic effort are poised to converge in a new era of practical underwater archaeological research on the North Pacific Coast.

Keywords:

• Prehistoric underwater archaeology
• North America Northwest Coast
• post-Pleistocene sea levels
• intertidal excavations
• underwater archaeology history
• coastal migrations

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank John O’Shea for inviting us to contribute this paper and the two anonymous reviewers for suggestions that improved this paper. Funding for Easton’s reef-net and Montague Harbour fieldwork was provided by the B.C. Heritage Trust. Support for the Montague Habour Project was also provided by the Underwater Archaeological and Archaeological Societies of British Columbia, the membership of which also provided considerable volunteer labour. Additional funding for Montague Habour was provided by the Canadian Access to Archaeology Program and the School of Liberal Arts and Scholarly Activity Grants of Yukon University.

Notes

1 Banned by Canada (Claxton and Elliot 1994) and restricted in US waters in favor of commercial fish traps, reef-netting salmon using modern gear was resurrected by Straits Salish groups in Washington State in the 1930s (Boxberger 1986, 1989). In Canada, Nick Claxton, an anthropologist and member of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich) nation, who had written his master's and doctoral theses on Salish fisheries (Claxton 2003, 2015) set the first reef-net in Canadian waters in almost a century at the Bedwell Harbour site in 2015 (Burgman 2015).

2 By this we mean that the lower levels of the underwater sediments should exhibit evidence of terrestrial exposure. Above this should lie environmental indicators of a high tide zone, followed by middle and lower intertidal indicators, capped by relatively recent submarine benthic sediments (Easton 1992c).

3 A proposal, we are happy to see being taken up on the NWC (e.g., Berg 2019) and world-wide (e.g., Dawson et al. 2017).