Archaeology of the drowned and the recent — shipwrecks, harbours, factories and battlefields still within living memory.
8 topics · 13 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Slater Mill
Historic American Engineering Record · 1968
Uses measured drawings and documentary research to record Slater Mill as the transplant of the British Arkwright water-frame spinning system to…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Submerged Cultural Resources Study: USS Arizona Memorial and Pearl Harbor National Historic Landmark
Daniel J. Lenihan · 1989
Presents the National Park Service's underwater survey of the sunken USS Arizona, arguing that the wreck should be managed as a war grave and…
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Development and Characteristics of Ancient Harbours: Applying the PADM Chart to the Case Studies of Ostia and Portus
Ferreol Salomon, Simon Keay, Nicolas Carayon & Jean-Philippe Goiran · 2016
Introduces a palaeoenvironmental age-depth chart for reading harbour sediment cores, and applies it to Rome's ports at Ostia and Portus to argue…
+3 more at this level
12 of 13 works
Historic American Engineering Record
Uses measured drawings and documentary research to record Slater Mill as the transplant of the British Arkwright water-frame spinning system to America, arguing that this transfer of machinery and expertise, not an independent invention, is what launched American textile industrialisation.
UNESCO
Sets in-situ preservation as the first option for underwater sites and extends the same protection principles used on land to shipwrecks and submerged landscapes in international waters.
TICCIH
Defines industrial heritage as whole landscapes of production rather than isolated monuments, and argues that machinery and processes are best conserved by keeping them working wherever this is safely possible, not only preserved as static remains.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Daniel J. Lenihan
Presents the National Park Service's underwater survey of the sunken USS Arizona, arguing that the wreck should be managed as a war grave and archaeological site whose ongoing corrosion needs monitoring rather than as salvage or a diving attraction.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Douglas D. Scott
Synthesises three decades of metal-detector survey at the Little Bighorn battlefield to argue that mapping cartridge cases and their firing-pin signatures can reconstruct troop movements more reliably than the conflicting soldier testimony the battle was previously read from.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Thijs Maarleveld, Ulrike Guérin & Barbara Egger
Sets in-situ preservation as the preferred default for shipwrecks and submerged sites, and requires any intervention on them to meet professional archaeological standards rather than treat wrecks as salvage.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Claudia Theune
Argues that the material remains of camps, battlefields and sites of persecution preserve details of twentieth-century atrocity that written testimony alone leaves out, and that excavating them is part of confronting that history rather than a neutral technical exercise.
Jonathan Benjamin et al.
Reports the first confirmed underwater Aboriginal archaeological sites on Australia's continental shelf, arguing that thousands of similar drowned landscapes worldwide are open to systematic underwater survey rather than lost beyond recovery.
Jonathan Gardner
Argues that mega events such as the Great Exhibition and the 2012 Olympics leave a long-lived material footprint on their host city, against the usual framing of them as brief and transient.
280 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Ferreol Salomon, Simon Keay, Nicolas Carayon & Jean-Philippe Goiran
Introduces a palaeoenvironmental age-depth chart for reading harbour sediment cores, and applies it to Rome's ports at Ostia and Portus to argue their basins silted up through ordinary deltaic sedimentation rather than the single catastrophic event sometimes blamed for their abandonment.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Vincent Gaffney et al.
Uses seismic survey data, sedimentary ancient DNA and radiocarbon dating from a buried palaeo-valley to show the Storegga tsunami reached and reshaped the submerged Mesolithic landscape of Doggerland around 8,150 years ago, rather than leaving the southern North Sea untouched as long assumed.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Stella Demesticha & Lucy Blue
Argues that shipwrecks, harbours and coastal sites across the Mediterranean should be read as one connected maritime landscape rather than as isolated finds.
330 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026