SLRC researchers, Drs Simon Fitch and Jessica Cook Hale, from the UKRI Life on the Edge project, have published a new paper in archaeological prospection on their pilot surveys in Apalachee Bay, Florida. The submerged landscape here is known to contain dozens of Pre-Contact sites. In addition to the goals of improving the geophysical and remote sensing ground model for this submerged landscape, the survey also sought to undertake the first independent scientific test of the contentious ‘HALD’ methodology, an acoustic resonance method that it is claimed to identify knapped lithic artefacts at and/or below the seabed through the identification of distinct ‘haystack’ responses. The results of this work indicate that the HALD method, as currently described, produces results that could not be scientifically replicated in this survey. Although the authors note that laboratory studies have successfully produced an acoustic signal in human-modified lithics, the field-based methods remain yet to be reliably determined. In addition to these results, the landscape mapping survey also recorded valuable information on buried and previously unrecorded landscape features that have archaeological significance and that may guide future site prospection globally.

Read the article at – https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/arp.1959