[Aztlan] Good Follow-up on the Gulf Coast Underwater Exploration

Wed Mar 14 13:32:05 CDT 2007

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from the March 14, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0314/ 
p13s01-stgn.html
High-tech undersea search for the first Americans

Ocean archeologist Robert Ballard is searching the floor of the Gulf  
of Mexico, via remote control.

By Moises Velasquez-Manoff | Correspondent of The Christian Science  
Monitor

MYSTIC, CONN.
Inside a darkened room, oceanographer Robert Ballard stares at an  
array of flat-screen monitors. The monitor to his left shows a crew  
of scientists aboard the submarine support vessel Carolyn Chouest in  
the Gulf of Mexico. On a monitor to his right, a roomful of Rhode  
Island high school students are intently focused on something unseen.  
And directly ahead, a large plasma TV plays live footage of what's  
holding everyone's attention: the ocean floor some 115 miles off the  
Texas coast.

The picture is transmitted by Argus, an unmanned submersible 1,800  
miles away from the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut. In fact, Dr.  
Ballard is presiding over the first undersea expedition conducted  
entirely by remote control. "It's the first time I've had enough  
confidence in the technology to step ashore," he says.

The subject of his search, as well as its location, are as precedent- 
setting as the means he's using to conduct it.

Enabled by technological advances such as satellite uplinks and the  
next generation of Internet, the expedition is a step toward  
Ballard's vision of a world experienced via "telepresence" ? not in  
person, but via remotely operated cameras and sensors. It's cheaper,  
requiring less manpower than typical science expeditions. It also has  
profound implications for any kind of undersea exploration,  
especially for the nascent field of ocean archaeology.

Today, Ballard and his team are seeking submerged evidence of the  
first Americans. Any proof of past human habitation in this area of  
former coastline could sink a long-dominant ? and many say hopelessly  
eroded ? hypothesis about who the first Americans were, how they got  
here, and when they arrived.

"It's a great story in human history," says Kevin McBride, a  
professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut at Storrs,  
who is involved in the project. "And as usual, it's a more  
complicated story than people think."

With the help of the US Navy's only research submarine, NR-1,  
Ballard's team is mapping the area to determine where early Americans  
might have lived when the Gulf's underwater hills sat at shoreline.  
At the height of the last ice age, sea levels were nearly 400 feet  
lower than they are today. The team's voyage began March 4, along a  
series of rises called the Flower Garden Banks. Scientists think the  
area, now filled with colorful sponges and abundant sea life, was a  
thriving coastal estuary 19,000 years ago ? and prime real estate for  
human habitation.

Dwellers on an ancient coast

An abundant amount of salt left from an even earlier time when a  
closed-off Gulf of Mexico completely evaporated would have provided  
an invaluable resource for preserving meat. Salt licks also would  
have attracted grazing animals and potential game. Inhabitants would  
have also found the coastal estuary full of easily harvestable  
shellfish, and if they ate shellfish, they probably left behind large  
piles of discarded shells that scientists can radiocarbon date.  
Because of the continental shelf's gradual incline in the area,  
rising seas would have quickly inundated the land, increasing the  
chances that artifacts were preserved.

This is Ballard's high-tech quest: proof of human habitation in the  
Gulf. That might refute the classic hypothesis that the first humans  
in the Americas were Siberian hunters, who followed herds over the  
Bering land bridge some 11,500 years ago. The hunters, the theory  
goes, passed into the interior of the continent via an ice-free  
corridor on the east side of the Canadian Rockies. Archaeologists  
call them the Clovis culture, after a distinctive spear point found  
near Clovis, N.M., in the 1930s.

But in the past 20 years, archaeologists have excavated many sites  
with radiocarbon dates older than the Clovis culture. Tools and  
shelters at Monte Verde in Chile are 12,500 years old. Stone flakes  
and fire pits found at the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania  
date to 14,000 years ago ? before the corridor to the interior would  
have been open. This observation gave birth to an alternate  
hypothesis: Perhaps the first Americans skirted the glaciers in boats.

An ice-free corridor inland

Bolstering this possibility, scientists now think that a sliver of  
coast between the great Cordilleran glacier on the Canadian Rockies  
and the Pacific Ocean remained clear during the Ice Age.

In 1997, Daryl Fedje of the Canadian Parks service pulled up a stone  
tool from the seafloor 170 feet down. The tool could have fallen  
there, but the seafloor itself, which was dotted with tree stumps and  
littered with pine cones, was clear evidence of an inhabitable ice  
age forest along the coast. Early seafarers could have occasionally  
pulled up to land during their migration.

But nothing has complicated the picture more than genetic evidence.  
Studies of native American groups indicate that up to five waves of  
people arrived at different times. Four of them ? A, B, C, and D ?  
are related to populations in Asia. Several of these groups share  
genetic markers with people in modern-day Indonesia, Australia, and  
the Pacific Islands ? places scientists think were settled by  
seafaring people.

Further confusing the picture, this fifth group, called "X," also  
shares genetic markers with European populations. Although  
controversial, this evidence lends credence to another, stranger  
possibility: Stone Age Europeans sailed west and made landfall in  
what was, even then, a land of immigrants.

New methods produce new data

"Sometimes methodology explodes and theory plays catch-up," says  
James Adovasio, executive director of the Mercyhurst Archaeological  
Institute at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., and the archaeologist  
who excavated Meadowcroft. "We're living at a time when the  
methodological techniques are exploding, and as they generate new,  
higher-resolution data, we have to reformulate how we think about  
stuff."

At stake in any undersea archaeological find is more than just the  
timing and chronology of the peopling of the Americas, says Professor  
Adovasio. Evidence of a seafaring culture in the Americas before the  
Clovis culture would overturn longstanding notions of our Stone Age  
forebears. Rather than a society of fur-clad, spear-wielding hunters  
stabbing mammoths, the first Americans may have been coastal  
dwellers, he says, a difference with great implications for  
everything from the division of labor in their society to the tools  
they used.

"Let us suppose that they find offshore campsites that are 16,000  
years old," says Adovasio. "It would put yet another nail into the  
Clovis sarcophagus."

'Telepresence' may let scientists - and tourists - be everywhere at once

In 1979, Robert Ballard found the first "black smokers," undersea  
vents spewing black sulfides near the Galapagos Islands. In 1985, he  
cemented his fame with the discovery of the Titanic in the north  
Atlantic.

Now, Dr. Ballard wants to change ? and enhance ? how everyone from  
scientists to schoolchildren explores the planet. Using a combination  
of remotely operated vehicles and cameras, he sees a future where  
"electronic travel" lets anyone look in on Earth's hard-to-reach  
corners with minimal cost and effort.

"It's not critical that your gall bladder gets to the Serengeti," he  
says. But "your spirit has no mass; you can move your spirit around  
cheaply."

On expeditions, remotely operated vehicles will scour the seafloor  
thousands of miles away 24/7. Individuals on rotating shifts will  
monitor the images. Only when something interesting comes into view  
will an on-call scientist assume command.

For the layperson, remotely operated cameras left behind will provide  
live video of everything from African plains to ocean canyons. Not  
only will this "telepresence" give the average student real-time  
access to the planet's mysteries, it will also lessen humanity's  
impact on the natural wonders we so eagerly wish to view.

None of this would be possible were it not for the emerging Internet2  
protocol, says Ballard. Enabled by a nationwide network of fiber- 
optic cables, the I-2 is up to 10,000 times faster than the average  
broadband connection ? 10 gigabits per second ? and allows for the  
live transmission of high-definition video.

In 2002, Ballard installed his first remotely operated camera in  
California's Monterey Bay. Children at his Institute for Exploration  
at the Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, Conn., could control an underwater  
vehicle 3,000 miles away. Remote cameras are slated for the Channel  
Islands off California, Hawaii and in the Florida Keys.

On the Flower Garden Banks expedition to the Gulf of Mexico (see main  
story), the public could tune in to one of the four live broadcasts  
online daily and submit questions in real time.

Mike Ruggeri's Ancient America and Mesoamerica News and Links
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index.html

Mike Ruggeri's Maya Archaeology News and Links
http://community-2.webtv.net/Topiltzin-2091/MIkeRuggerisMaya/index.html

Mike Ruggeri's Ancient America Museum Exhibitions, Conferences and  
Lectures
http://community-2.webtv.net/Topiltzin-2091/AncientAmerica/index.html

Mike Ruggeri's Mound
Builders and Ancient Southwest News and Links
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Mike Ruggeri's Andean Archaeology News and Links
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