|
Southampton Oceanography Centre, Empress Dock, Southampton SO14 3ZH, UK
Submarine archaeological sites of human occupation on the continental shelf provide evidence of palaeo-shorelines during the last 50 000 years, with possibly longer periods of accessible data. Sites are widely distributed globally, and provide a rich source of peripheral information on landscapes, climate, water supply, sediment transport, and soil types, which are relevant to coastal tectonics and processes, in addition to location, elevation, and date. More than 500 sites have been discovered world-wide where there are the remains of human occupation under the sea. Artefacts embedded in a few metres of sediments can survive multiple marine transgression, given local topography that creates suitable wave and current conditions. The raw data have been analysed to separate glacial eustatic fluctuations of global sea level and local or regional tectonic processes. The number of sites in the Mediterranean permits the detection of regional vertical tectonic displacement with a spatial resolution of a few tens of kilometres in many regions. In other parts of the world the density of sites is not yet sufficient to achieve this, but indicators of vertical movements, or lack of vertical movement, provide valuable point data. Continuing discovery of new sites indicates that the technique will provide data with improved spatial resolution, and outside the Americas, over a timescale extending to hundreds of millennia, and possibly one million years
