Both in England and the United States, several government-sponsored programs are using historic bathymetry, GIS, and 3D terrain modeling to reconstruct the topography and archaeological sensitivity of now both buried and submerged shore areas as they appeared prior to being covered by landfill or inundated by rising seas.
For example, in England, Dr. Spikins of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne is directing a futuristic project entitled: A Search for Submerged Early Postglacial Sites: Prospection Based on GPS Based Predictive Model. High-resolution topographic reconstructions will be used to identify subtle underwater landscape features similar to those found in association with known sites. Also in England, scientists, working with a government-funded Estuarine Research Programme, are using GIS and 3D terrain to model and compare historic British Admiralty Charts dating back to 1847. Work directed by Dr. Daphne van der Wal is using these georeferenced correlations of historic naval charts to track changes in the estuary morphology and sedimentation rates over the last 150 years.
In the eastern seaboard of the US, historic bathymetry from US Army Civil War-era mud depth surveys is being used by the author to develop 3D georeferenced reconstructions of the premarsh topography of the now inundated wetlands of the New Jersey Hackensack Meadowlands. Three-dimension terrain modeling is being used to define what the preinundation landscape looked like, and where people may have lived on it over the last 3000 years, and when the water level was 20-30 m lower than today. Historic GIS comparisons are defining which of the sensitive archaelogical areas may have survive modern impacts (Figure 4).
As has been shown for earlier prehistoric submarine landscapes in Europe and the Pacific Coast of North America, these 3D terrain models of the Civil War-era bathymetry have documented a diverse ‘preinundation landscape’ of fresh water drainages, terraces, plateaus, ridges, tidal, and estuary zones beneath the modern water level. High-resolution sediment core sample sequences - taken at 4 cm or at 20-50-year intervals - will be used to create a detailed record of changing climatic, habitat, and sea-level rise. This record of localized environmental changed will be used to ‘skin’ the digital premarsh landscape model with period-specific plant and tree cover (Figure 4). Scaled digital GIS overlays of all identified past impacts (canals, roads, infrastructure, land fills, toxic dumps, etc.) will be subtracted from areas of projected sensitivity to provide environmental review agencies with a target-specific strategy to focus resources on only undisturbed areas of surviving potential archaeological sensitivity (see Figure 5).
World History
