What is past is prologue: excavations at the Econfina Channel site,Apalachee Bay,Florida, USA

Offshore submerged sites can retain valuable data concerning many questions of interest to archaeology, including what form coastal occupations may have taken during periods before the establishment of modern coastlines and late Holocene climate and ecological conditions. However, submerged offshore sites experience postdepositional forces entirely unlike those in terrestrial contexts, including erosion/deflation of sediments, and degradation of artifacts and/or features caused by the marine environment. Methodological and theoretical approaches to assessing submerged marine sites, versus terrestrial ones, must be adjusted accordingly to extract valuable data and interpretations from them. This study demonstrates the application of these different approaches at the Econfina Channel site (8TA139) in Apalachee Bay, Florida, USA. The site appears to contain significant evidence for coastally adapted occupation during the final part of the Middle Archaic period (～8600–5000?cal?BP), but we needed to address marine site formation processes before we could assess human activities at the site. Sedimentological and archaeological traces of human activities can be teased out using geoarchaeological methods, which differentiate between nonhuman postdepositional processes and the cultural material remains left behind by those who used the site before it was abandoned and subsequently submerged.