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Encyclopedia entry: marine and underwater archaeology
- Article from:
- The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea
Copyright© The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea 2006, originally published by Oxford University Press 2006. (Hide copyright information)
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marine and underwater archaeology.
Humankind's artefacts litter the seabed, partly as a result of mercantile and naval activities, but also because landscapes have become submerged. This submergence is not only the result of the
sea level
rising as the
ice
caps melted at the end of last glaciation 20,000 years ago, but also a result of tectonic movements. For example, the southern half of the North Sea was only inundated by the sea about 7,000 years ago. Up until then it had been sparsely populated by bands of stone age hunter-gatherers and in 2003 two stone-age settlements dating back to the Mesolithic period, between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, were found off the coast of ...