Hardesty 2012 CR Ford 2011 the Archaeology of Maritime Landscapes JICA 7

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Journal of Island & Coastal Archaeology, 7:156–157, 2012Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1556-4894 print / 1556-1828 onlineDOI: 10.1080/15564894.2011.636791

The Archaeology of Maritime Landscapes

Donald L. Hardesty Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Reno, Reno,

Nevada, USA

The Archaeology of Maritime Landscapes.

Edited by Ben Ford. Springer, New York.2011. ISBN 978-1-4419-4 (Hardback US$129), 352pp.

As a book, The Archaeology of Maritime Landscapes originated in papers given atthe Society for Historical Archaeology 2008Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology. The underlying theme of thepapers, now chapters making up an anthol-ogy, is the application of the concept of the“Maritime Cultural Landscape” as proposedand developed by Norwegian archaeologistChrister Westerdahl. Maritime cultural land-scapes “combine physical aspects of land-scape and seascape to analyze the cultureof maritime peoples within a spatial con-text” (p. 4). The approach integrates mar-itime history and ethnography with the ar-chaeological record of pastmaritime systemsto explore how “people perceived and un-derstood the sea and used this knowledgeand understanding to order and constitute

the landscape and societies that they livedin” (p. 5).

The first few chapters of the book aremostly concernedwithmodelingprehistoricsite locations associated with the earliesthuman migration into the Americas. Inchapter 1, “Searching for Santarosae: Sur- veying Submerged landscapes for Evidenceof Paleocoastal Habitation off California’sNorthern Channel Islands,” Jack Watts, Brian

Address correspondence to Donald L. Hardesty, Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada,Reno, 5000 Lakeridge Terrace East, Reno, NV 89509, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Fulfrost, and Jon Erlandson develop a pre-

dictive model for the location of submergedpaleocoastal sites around California’s San-tarosae Island. In chapter 2, “Testing thePaleo-Maritime Hypothesis for Glacial LakeIroquois,” Margaret Schulz, Susan Winchell-Sweeney, and Laurie Rush review the evi-dence for Paleoindian maritime migrationsby boat along Pleistocene shorelines. JessiHalligan develops a “model of potentialsite location and site preservation includ-ing both cultural and natural variables topredict where submerged prehistoric sites

may be found in Lake Ontario” (p. 59) inchapter3,“LakeOntarioPaleoshorelinesandSubmerged Prehistoric Site Potential in theGreat Lakes.”

In chapter 4, “The Shoreline as a Bridge,Not a Boundary: Cognitive Maritime Land-scapes of Lake Ontario,” Ben Ford exploresregional scale patterns of landscape percep-tion through past uses of the Lake Ontarioshore. Wayne R. Lusardi searches for thepast human uses of Thunder Bay in Lake

Huron and Michigan’s Lower Peninsula inchapter 5, “Rock, Paper, Shipwreck! TheMaritime Cultural Landscape of Thunder Bay.” In chapter 6, “Ship to Shore: Inuit,EarlyEuropeans,and Maritime Landscapes inthe Northern Gulf of St. Lawrence,” William W. Fitzhugh, Anja Herzog, Sophia Perdikaris,and Brenna McLeod discuss archaeologicalresearchatHareHarborintheQuebecLower North Shore which revealed “sixteenth



Book Review

century Basque and later European occupa-tion of the ‘Grand Bay’ region and providessettlement evidence for at least short-term year-round Inuit expansion into the Gulf” (p.

123). Christopher Jazwa interprets the pondregion of southern Rhode Island as a Mar-itime Cultural Landscape in chapter 7, “Tem-poral Changes in a Precontact and ContactPeriod Cultural Landscape Along the South-ern Rhode Island Coast.” In chapter 8, “A Maritime Landscape of Old Navy Cove andDeadman’s Island,” Krista Jordan-Greene ex-plores a landscape in the city of Gulf Breezenear Pensacola, Florida. The island’s history began as a careeningstation forship cleaningand repair in the early 1700s; it then changed

to a quarantine station, a marine railway, anda probable ship graveyard.

Chapters 9 and 10 are perhaps the mostprovocative in the book. Here, Amanda M.Evans and Matthew E. Keith apply the con-cept of the Maritime Cultural Landscapeto the Galveston, Texas region to developsite location models of both prehistoric andhistoric sites. The most interesting issue,as discussed by Westerdahl in Chapter 18,is “How do you use the maritime cultural

landscape approach for submerged land-scapes? Of course, there might be a relictcultural landscape down there, but what re-ally matters is the fact that you have to re-construct the landscape with each changein the coastline. Then comes the impor-tant question: which coastlines and land-scape should be reconstructed?” (p. 335).In chapter 11, “The Hidden World of theMaritime Maya: Lost Landscapes Along theNorth Coast of Quintana Roo,” Mexico, Jef-frey B. Glover, Dominique Rissolo, and Jen-

nifer P. Mathews use the MCL to explorethe relationship between the Maya and their coastallandscapeinMexico’sYucatanPenin-sula. The article focuses upon the archae-ological record of the ancient port settle-ment of Vista Alegre in northern QuintanaRoo.

In a most interesting study that focuseson the landscape expression of cultural iden-tity, Heather E. Hatch describes and analyzesthe archaeological record of Pirate maritime

culture at “The Barcadares in Belize” in chap-ter 12. In chapter 13, James P. Delgado,

Frederick H. Hanselmann, and DominiqueRissolo discuss The “‘Richest River in the World’: The Maritime Cultural Landscape of the Mouth of the Rio Chagres, Republica de

Panama.” “The various features and sites atthe mouth of the Chagres reflect its ongo-ing use as a maritime highway, both in pre-historic and historic times, and particularly its importance and vulnerability during theSpanish Colonial era”(p. 243). Claire P. Dap-pert “uses the construction of the Schooner Independence on the shore of Kangaroo Is-land in South Australia by an American seal-ing crew of the brig Union as a case study to demonstrate the significance of ‘place’in the land-culture nexus” (p. 248) in chap-

ter 14, “US Shipbuilding Activities at Amer-ican River, South Australia: Finding Signif-icance of ‘Place’ in the Maritime CulturalLandscape.”

In what is perhaps the most stimulatingcontribution to the book, Brad Duncan “ex-plores the landscapes of a fishingcommunity in Queenscliff, a nineteenth century coastaltown in Victoria, Australia, and delves intohow the notion of maritime cultural land-scapes might be expressed and investigated”

(p. 267) in chapter 15. Christer Westerdahldiscusses human cognition at sea and on theshore as perceptions associated with mar-itime culture in chapter 16, “The Binary Re-lationshipofSeaandLand.”Inchapter17,JoeFlatman explores the theoretical perspec-tive of human agency in landscape formationthroughthreecasestudies:“MedievalMonas-ticism and Water,” “Prehistoric and DefenseLandscapes of the Scottish West Coast,” andthe “Wreck of the MSC Napoli.”

Overall, I found the book to be thought

provoking, enjoyable, and a significant con-tribution to the discipline of archaeology through its discussion of the methodologi-cal and theoretical issues underlying the ap-plication of the landscape concept to mar-itime cultures and societies. The maritimelandscapeapproachprovidesaframeworktointegrate terrestrial and underwater archae-ology and offers a way to link together pre-historic and historic archaeology. It also is aneffective tool for the heritage management

of maritime sites. The authors are to be con-gratulated on a job well done.



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Hardesty 2012 CR Ford 2011 the Archaeology of Maritime Landscapes JICA 7