Early human history: waiting under the waves....

For our ancient ancestors, coastlines were attractive places to settle and experiment with what became the foundations of civilization. However, between twenty and six thousand years ago the major glaciers melted, and these sites — where humans first began to make fishing equipment, build boats and create permanent settlements — became engulfed by the rising seas.
In many cases, instead of destroying these ancient landscapes, the rising sea level actually preserved them, along with many details from the story of our past.
“There are large gaps in our general knowledge of early history,” says Geoff Bailey of the University of York’s Department of Archaeology. “We have a lot to learn by looking underwater. There are many sites to discover and examine, and preservation is in fact often better than on land.”
Working in places as distant as the Southern Red Sea, the shores near Gibraltar, and off the coast of England, Bailey and his colleagues look for sites containing the well-preserved ancient remains that are rare in inland sites: wood, woven fibers, beetles and insects, plant material, pottery (sometimes with the remains of food inside) and even bones and other organic material containing DNA traces.
To aid in the collection and sharing of this information, Bailey and colleagues have started a new European research network, called SPLASH, or “Submerged Prehistoric Landscapes and Archaeology of the continental Shelf.” The project was recently awarded funding by the European Union under the Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action framework. Its first phase of work will last four years.
“Over the past twenty to thirty years, enormous amounts of submarine data have been gathered on the seas,” says Nic Flemming, SPLASH member and research fellow at the National Oceanographic Center in Southampton, England. “No one has previously thought of systematically using this data for archaeology, but in fact we can use it to reconstruct past, once-dry landscapes. What we need is a system to tap into these archives all over Europe.”

Beginning with a splash
SPLASH with begin by providing the research and cultural management communities with the means to access, browse, recover, manipulate and integrate all relevant earth science and archaeological data currently archived in European digital repositories. This will weave together large stores of information about Europe’s coastlines, wetlands and soil profiles, including mineral and organic content.
 Using e-Infrastructures, researchers will be able to respond to EU Marine Policy/Strategy initiatives (DG MARE), and parallel initiatives on pan-European electronic data access (DG INFSO) and support for operational oceanography (DG RTD and DG ENTR) to provide rapid access to maritime data in a standardised way, allowing researchers to dig into large data sets from distributed archives.
“We will be able to mobilise knowledge and skills that are currently dispersed across national and disciplinary boundaries,” says Bailey, “and begin to combine the efforts of individuals in marine and environmental sciences, the archaeological community, heritage organisations, and industry in tackling archaeology’s last frontier: the deeply submerged landscapes and prehistory of the continental shelf ”