Submerged pre-contact sites in Apalachee Bay, Florida, have been the focus of systematic archaeological research for more than four decades, in fact it is one of seven projects that define modern methodologies for conducting submerged precontact research in the United States (Faught and Smith 2021).
Clint’s Scallop Hole (8JE1796) is one of the newest sites to have been identified Apalachee Bay. Clint’s Scallop Hole was found in 2017 by recreational divers who were diving for scallops and reported to the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research (FBAR). The site was reported as four sandy holes in seagrass with lots of broken rock.
The site was relocated by ARCO-OP supported SPLASH archaeologists in 2018 and again in 2019. ARCO-OP (and SPLASH) member Morgan Smith identifies the site as a submerged pre-contact quarry. During two weeks in the summer of 2019, visiting students from FSU and Texas A&M underwater field schools nearby, mapped and collected artifacts on the surface of the site.
Shawn Joy has reconstructed a sea-level model for the bay and he estimates that the site was submerged approximately 5,000 years ago (Joy 2019). The low energy hydrological environment of Apalachee Bay appear to have preserved the context of the site, as indicated by the identification of flakes refit to lithic cores. There appear to be multiple lithic reduction clusters. No diagnostic artifacts have been identified, yet, leaving the cultural periods of use a mystery. But certainly older than its submergence by the sea, and probably a palimpsest of knapper visits.
ARCO-OP’s SPLASH team intend to return to the site to conduct Phase III excavations in the summer of 2021.
The area is being systematically scanned with ARCO-OP’s NTCPTT grant Edge Tech 424 sub-bottom profiler to define the site boundaries and locate significant concentrations.
And these sub-bottom data are being processed with ARCO-OP’s SONARWIZ software. The analysis of the sub-bottom data was focused on identifying HALD “haystacks”, the water column phenomena developed in Israel and Denmark. HALD stands for Human Altered Lithic Detection to refer to the effects of sonar on human-altered lithic material deposited at submerged sites (Grøn et al. 2018).
