Fuente: https://www.smithsonianmag.com
Por:
Megan Gannon
Australia has a deep human history stretching back
65,000 years, but many of its oldest archaeological sites are now
underwater. In an encouraging sign that Aboriginal artifacts and
landscapes may actually be preserved offshore, archaeologists have
discovered a 7,000-year-old site submerged along Australia's continental
shelf, the first of its kind. Their discovery is outlined today in the
journal PLoS One.
At the end of the last ice age, about 12,000
years ago, when glaciers melted and sea level rose, waters inundated
one-third of Australia’s habitable land. As part of a project called Deep History of Sea Country,
Jonathan Benjamin, a professor of maritime archaeology at Flinders
University in Adelaide, led a team that searched for submerged sites off
Murujuga (also known as the Dampier Archipelago), a dry and rocky
coastal region in northwestern Australia.
This area has a wealth of inland archaeological sites, including more than one million examples
of rock art. About 18,000 years ago, the shoreline of Murujuga would
have extended another 100 miles further than the current coast. But
Benjamin and his colleagues had little to go on when they began to
search the offshore territory.
"We were going into an area completely cold in
terms of the probability of discovery," Benjamin says. "So we just
figured if we could throw every bit of technology and a lot of smart
people at the problem, after three years, we should come up with
something."
At first, the team used LiDAR-mounted airplanes
and sonar-equipped boats to scan the shallow seas around Murujuga for
places that might have the right conditions for preservation of
artifacts. (They ruled out areas where the seabed is covered in lots of
shifting sand, for example.) Last year, divers suited up in scuba gear
to survey the identified targets. The first few sites delivered no
finds. Then came Cape Bruguieres Channel.
Chelsea Wiseman, a doctoral student at Flinders
University, recalls swimming through turquoise water when her colleague,
John McCarthy, grabbed her fin and showed her an igneous rock stone
tool. "The first one he handed me was just unmistakably a lithic
artifact," Wiseman says. "Then we found four or five others."
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