New Approaches to Using Old Artifacts: Advances in Oceanography-Archeology Research

Collaborations between archeologists and aquatic scientists are driving forward a whole new subdiscipline of methods to document and understand environmental change. Climate change, food webs, El Niño La Niña oscillations, and alterations to biotic factors such as salinity and stream flow have all been studied via aquatic archeological material. Much of this research is conducted on shell middens, the archeological materials they contain, and substrates they are deposited in. This article provides a primer on the formation of shell middens, procedures of midden archeological excavation, and the recent advances in aquatic environmental change research from analyzing archeological material collected from middens.