Lost

damn. i gotta tell you.
this book of mine is getting better and better!

i may have already blogged about it, but the book is exciting me.
it's talking of how sea level used to be 300+ feet lower than it is today about 10kya (thousand years ago), and then by 9kya, an influx of water made sea level rise to 50 feet above what it is today. it's current level came around 8kya (all are +/- a few hundred years).

anyway. the author focuses on archaeology done in the Queen Charloette Islands, which is the large one above Vancouver and just below Alaska's border.
They're all over, but mostly looking at the southern area of the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve.
On one 20-yard stretch of a beach, they came across 2,000 artifacts. So after some excavation to dig deeper in that area, which tended to involve using low tide to their advantage all the way up to where they were still knee deep in waves searching for artifacts, they came across an arrowhead with a barnacle on it!
dating that poor bastard, they realized that the lithic was at least 10.3 kya. if not older.
this still isn't old enough to turn all the scientific heads, but it's a start.

from this point, they took to surveying the shallows off shore to see what could have been a possible lake back when sea levels were lower.
in proximity to the beach that was littered with artifacts, they found what was once a lake was 344 feet down.
now although people, like the guy who runs the 5th dimension dive shop, have been down about 300 feet, they didn't have the resources to do this.
Instead they stayed in shallower areas about 40 feet down to see what can be seen.
And, well. unfortunately, that's where i'm at now.
i guess you'll have to stay tuned to find out what they found, if anything.
the main point now is that there were actual refuges during the Pleistocene (Ice Age) for people to travel to along the coast where resources were plentiful enough to sustain life.
...espeically in the summer.

i was just so excited to see that this type of shit is actually out there!
the author was complaining about how most of the underwater archaeology done is of a single event, like a shipwreck.
once you find the site, you're set. it's one point in time, everything dates to the same time.
but the kind that these people are doing is spread out over time, more like the normal archaeology done on land.
however, that makes it a more difficult task and more difficult to date.

so on the upside. shit like what i'm REALLY interested in, is actually being done (or at least it was 15 years ago), but the downside is that it's being done in Canada.
I guess it could be worse, but is Canada really that bad?
People wouldn't scoff at you cuz your leader's a retard.
however they would scoff cuz you're that weird cousin to the north, eh?
Canada's kinda up-and-coming though, isn't it?
at least Vancouver's doing alright for itself.
i could kinda see myself going there.
maybe.

there's a cool school there called Simon Fraser.
Yukon College is where the divers were from.
But I'd think that would be worse than going to UAA (Anchorage) cuz you'd be in the mountains, without water, and therefore the temperatures in the winter would probably be even more harsh.
something to look into...

if only this kind of thing was more prevalent.
maybe i should write a grant with underwater plans: searching for OIL/paleoindian artifacts.
score!