Author: Marcel Teschendorff
Teschendorff, Marcel, 2022 Wardanaak Boodjar ‘The Flood’: connecting the submerged landscapes and subaerial archaeology of the Swan Coastal Plain, Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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Aboriginal people have occupied southwestern Australia for at least the last 48 ka. Since that time, 2.12 million km2 of the continental land mass of Australia has been inundated by sea-level rise. Much of this submerged landscape is believed to have been inhabited by people. Where cultural material has survived transgressive events, it has the potential to offer insights into past strategies of occupance and resource usage. However, given the vast scale of inundation, the question remains: how to locate submerged landscape sites on the continental shelf? Recent investigations on Western Australia’s northwest shelf have demonstrated that in situ archaeological sites can survive the often-destructive effect of marine inundation, establishing the beginnings of an ‘Australian Model’ of practice for submerged site detection. This thesis adopts the Australian Model and tests its applicability in a different environmental and cultural region of Australia, specifically, the Rottnest Shelf, being the area of the southwestern continental shelf adjacent to the Swan Coastal Plain. The focus of this study is therefore the development of a method for the identification of areas on the continental shelf adjacent to the Swan Coastal Plain that have high preservation potential for submerged archaeological sites. In the absence of known submerged sites on the southwest shelf, terrestrial analogy is used as the basis for a Geographic Information Systems predictive model for the identification of areas of high preservation potential. This study comprises a critical review of the subaerial archaeological record of the Swan Coastal Plain to establish site-landform associations as the basis for terrestrial analogy. It also includes an identification of the physical processes affecting the topography of the Swan Coastal Plain and Rottnest Shelf to understand their potential impact on submerged site preservation. A Digital Relief Model is created, using topographic data of the Swan Coastal Plain and bathymetric data of the Rottnest Shelf, to locate and map submerged landforms with a high probability of site association. The results illustrate how the modern physical environment and regional archaeological record of the Swan Coastal Plain can help to identify areas of high preservation potential in the search for the submerged cultural heritage of southwestern Australia’s first peoples.
Keywords: Archaeology, Maritime Archaeology, Submerged Landscapes, Sea-level Change, Western Australia, Swan Coastal Plain
Subject: Archaeology thesis
Thesis type: Masters
Completed: 2022
School: College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor: Jonathan Benjamin