By Charlotte Jarvis and Ole Varmer Bottom Trawling  Ecologists and fishery scientists have been concerned about bottom trawling for centuries. The first known reference to the activity is in a 1375 English Parliamentary document and that initial mention highlights the destructive nature of the practice (Petition by the Commons to King Edward III, 1376 seen in Bolster 2012, p. 235). Bottom trawling impacts the natural heritage of the ocean in many ways, including by reducing topography, compression, and resuspension of sediments, decreasing complexity, causing both physical and chemical da ..read more

By Steven J. Filoromo, RPA, TerraXplorations, Inc., Baton Rouge, Louisiana Bayous are subject to constant change over the long course of history. The rate of change today is unprecedented. As a result, many archaeologists working in southern Louisiana are developing unique approaches to understand the changing environments and their heritage at risk. Mentions of Louisiana’s swamps and bayous conjure images of a shifting landscape of wild or bucolic imagery. These images often include scenery where Spanish moss hangs over still water while cypress knees chart clear paths for flat boats to cross ..read more

By Alicia Johnson, Graduate Researcher, Alexandria Centre For Maritime Archaeology & Underwater Cultural Heritage While scouring the depths of the Red Sea in 1955, Jacques Cousteau, a famed explorer, discovered the famous Thistlegorm, a British merchant vessel submerged off the Southern tip of the Sinai. The extensive documentation and international media coverage of Cousteau’s discovery spurred significant public interest in maritime exploration and launched the shipwreck’s reputation as a remarkable dive site. It is estimated that Thistlegorm, a World War Two British warship sunk by Luft ..read more

By Susan B.M. Langley, Maryland State Underwater Archaeologist 2023 celebrates the 35th anniversary of the Maryland Maritime Archaeology Program In Maryland, April is Archaeology Month and May is Preservation Month, so this is an appropriate time to consider these tiny creatures that pose a large threat to the preservation of submerged archaeological resources. While these marine woodborers have impacted commerce and safety since humanity took to the sea, changes in construction materials of ships and harbor infrastructure, as well as the use of effective but environmentally dubious chemical t ..read more

By Susan B.M. Langley, Maryland State Underwater Archaeologist 2023 celebrates the 35th anniversary of the Maryland Maritime Archaeology Program In Maryland, April is Archaeology Month and May is Preservation Month, so this is an appropriate time to consider these tiny creatures that pose a large threat to the preservation of submerged archaeological resources. While these marine woodborers have impacted commerce and safety since humanity took to the sea, changes in construction materials of ships and harbor infrastructure, as well as the use of effective but environmentally dubious chemical t ..read more

By Allyson Ropp, Ph.D. Candidate, East Carolina University Think back to your favorite story. What made it so exciting? Was it the characters? Was it the conflict or problem that the main characters needed to solve? Or was it how the characters ended up solving the problem? Maybe it was all three! What all good stories have in common is a beginning, a middle, and an end – each setting up an important part of the story that brings you into the action. The beginning is the setup. It provides the exposition of the story, introducing us to the main characters and their world. The middle presents a ..read more

By Susan B.M. Langley, Maryland State Underwater Archaeologist 2023 celebrates the 35th anniversary of the Maryland Maritime Archaeology Program In Maryland, April is Archaeology Month and May is Preservation Month, so this is an appropriate time to consider these tiny creatures that pose a large threat to the preservation of submerged archaeological resources. While these marine woodborers have impacted commerce and safety since humanity took to the sea, changes in construction materials of ships and harbor infrastructure, as well as the use of effective but environmentally dubious chemical t ..read more

By Katherine G. Parker, Doctoral candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville When first I met with Bob Morgan, then the Heritage Program Manager for Francis Marion National Forest (FMNF) in South Carolina, in 2019 to discuss my interest in researching families involved in moonshining on land that the Forest Service now owned, he warned me that there wouldn’t be much left. The Bureau of Forestry, which had preceded the US Forest Service, had bulldozed every remnant of human activity on the landscape that they could find when they acquired the land from declining ti ..read more

By Lindsey Cochran, Assistant Professor, East Tennessee State University; Grant Snitker, Director of the Cultural Resource Sciences and Fire Lab, New Mexico Consortium An urgent question for archaeologists as we race to react to the climate crisis is: what are we losing? The biased nature of the collective archaeological dataset presents an unequal assessment of heritage at risk. As we know, today’s cultural landscape boundaries are different than those in the past. The majority of known cultural heritage sites are driven by cultural resource management and compliance, meaning known sites are ..read more

By Lindsey Cochran, Assistant Professor, East Tennessee State University; Grant Snitker, Director of the Cultural Resource Sciences and Fire Lab, New Mexico Consortium An urgent question for archaeologists as we race to react to the climate crisis is: what are we losing? The biased nature of the collective archaeological dataset presents an unequal assessment of heritage at risk. As we know, today’s cultural landscape boundaries are different than those in the past. The majority of known cultural heritage sites are driven by cultural resource management and compliance, meaning known sites are ..read more