Belgium: Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology in the Intertidal and Subtidal Zones of the North Sea

Pieters, Marnix; Missiaen, Tine; Clercq, Marc De; Demerre, I.; Haelst, Sven Van

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37367-2_9

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…This assumption is sometimes accepted uncritically on the grounds of proximity to the adjacent shoreline and the greater exposure of the shoreline and the intertidal zone to turbulent wave action. However, there are many cases of independently dated sites in the modern intertidal zone in other parts of the world that demonstrably do belong to a pre-inundation land surface, just as there are examples of fully subtidal sites suspected of being displaced from the adjacent land surface and washed into the sea (Bailey, Galanidou, et al, 2020;Bailey, Momber, et al, 2020;Bayón & Politis, 2014;Bicho et al, 2020;Billard et al, 2020;Galanidou et al, 2020;Galili et al, 2020;Glorstad et al, 2020;Jöns et al, 2020;Peeters & Amkreutz, 2020;Pieters et al, 2020;Rossi et al, 2020;Westley & Woodman, 2020). The key issue in every case is not whether artifacts are intertidal or subtidal, but whether they were first discarded by cultural activity on a pre-inundation land surface.…”

Section: Intertidal or Subtidalmentioning

confidence: 99%

A wet strawman: A response to Ward et al.

et al. 2022

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Ward et al. (2022) assert in their desktop study that we are "mistaken" in our interpretation of the artifacts at the Cape Bruguières Channel (CBC), Flying Foam Passage (FF), and Dolphin Island (DI) sites as evidence of cultural activity on a pre-inundation land surface (Benjamin et al., 2020 [CBC and FF]; Dortch et al., 2019 [DI]) and that we have failed to take account of local hydrodynamic processes that could have displaced artifacts and moved them over much greater distances than we thought possible. They argue two key points in support: (1) that "these sites are in the intertidal zone" (p. 783) and (2) that "many or all artefacts are likely to have been reworked" (p. 783). | SUPPORTING DATA SETSWard et al. have relied on a hydrodynamic model with a parent 2500 m grid and a smaller nested 500 m grid (Ward et al. supplementary information). From this, they have derived modeled current movements at peak ebb and flood tides and generated a range of hypotheses of possible artifact movement in response to these current flows. They do not model currents at the seabed nor provide a justification for their bed roughness value of 0.0002 m. The smaller 500 m grid is almost five times larger than the width of the CBC reported in Benjamin et al., so there is no way this model could accurately represent current speeds in CBC, yet they still incorporate a grid cell over this site and model the current speed. The DI site reported in Dortch et al. is located within a shallow embayment on the eastern side of the FF and is not even captured in their grid. Large reef areas across the northern archipelago (immediately adjacent to CBC) are also completely unsurveyed. Nevertheless, this area is incorporated into the grid mesh. In their supplementary information, they also refer to RPS data with measured cyclonic current speeds that exceed 2 m/s on the North West Shelf. They do not provide a location for this measurement. Given that the North West Shelf covers an area of over 200,000 km 2 with tidal ranges of more than 10 m in the north, we question how this value is even remotely relevant to the Murujuga sites. It is axiomatic in geoarchaeological studies of underwater archaeological sites that the local conditions most relevant to archaeological site formation and deformation processes can vary over distances of as little as 10 s or 100 s of meters. The model proposed by Ward et al. is too coarse to be useful in contradicting our LETTER TO THE EDITORS

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