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Shipwreck Geoarchaeology

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Encyclopedia of Geoarchaeology

Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series ((EESS))

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Introduction

The past two decades have witnessed remarkable advances in seafloor mapping, with high-resolution acoustic imaging now routinely used in archaeological studies (e.g., Plets et al., 2011; Westley et al., 2011). Technological and methodological advances in acoustic imaging and digital rendering now permit shipwreck sites and individual artifacts to be imaged at centimetric resolution in tens or hundreds of meters of water (Quinn et al., 2005). Beyond using acoustics as merely a prospection tool for locating wreck sites, researchers are increasingly exploiting the quantitative aspects of these data, for example, using time-lapse multi-beam echo-sounder (MBES) bathymetric surveys to develop accretion-erosion plots (Quinn and Boland, 2010) and using MBES backscatter data to identify shipwrecks remotely (Masetti and Calder, 2012).

In response to the 1992 Valetta European Convention on the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage and the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Maritime Archaeology, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Ulster, BT52 1SA, Coleraine, UK

    Rory Quinn

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  1. Rory Quinn
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Correspondence to Rory Quinn .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Fordham University, Bronx, NY, USA

    Allan S. Gilbert

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Quinn, R. (2017). Shipwreck Geoarchaeology. In: Gilbert, A.S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Geoarchaeology. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4409-0_120

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