The archaeology of underwater caves arose from a session at the 2012 Society for American Archaeology conference held in Memphis, Tennessee. As with many edited monographs to emerge from conferences, it is a mixed bag of useful case studies, site information and regional polemics, but is poorer for its often unexamined assumptions, weakly integrated site reports that lack strong intellectual direction, and, in a very few chapters, considerable rhetoric. Monographs such as this one are useful as they allow for the presentation of works and ideas in progress, as well as local accounts and specialist knowledge that often remain the purview of small and relatively closed interest groups. Many of the chapters could, however, have done with major editing including for English expression. It is not until the short concluding chapter by Campbell that a key archaeological guideline is presented for all the chapters, giving a sense that the book is more than the sum of the parts. In that final chapter, a useful division is made between cave sites with ‘direct deposition’, whereby cultural materials were deposited on dry surfaces lying above water prior to their inundation—such as Cosquer Cave in France—and cave sites that were wet when cultural deposition took place (‘remote deposition’), so that cultural materials must have been placed, fallen or thrown into the water, percolating to rest on the floor below. These two different modes of deposition have major implications for understanding the integrity of archaeological records and their cultural motives.
The archaeology of underwater caves also broaches a number of broader issues. An example: to understand a site—to address the particular research questions being asked—we need to be able to travel across geographic scales, placing a site in its broader environmental setting. Yet too often in archaeology, field directors and participating volunteers remain at a site without having ventured into the surrounding terrain to understand better the kinds of landscape processes that may have operated at varied spatial scales. This point is well made in The archaeology of underwater caves, as a number of authors clearly show that without understanding an underwater site’s broader sediment catchment, we cannot well understand the original location, antiquity or behavioural context of the cultural deposits in question. Hence in the sinkholes of Florida and cenotes of Central America, the configuration of cave walls and submerged floors, underwater currents and chemistry, and above-ground features strongly influence how fallen materials and thrown offerings come to rest. This general principle of understanding the broader environmental context of a site rings as true for underwater deposits as it does for terrestrial ones, and is usefully expressed through less commonly considered examples in this volume.
Many of the authors in The archaeology of underwater caves point out that underwater sites with remote deposition (where cultural deposits were thrown into the water, subsequently coming to rest on submerged surfaces), and deep, dark caves generally, were locations of religious rituals. While this may or may not be true in general, nowhere is the notion of ritual defined or unpacked, and only one chapter explores the topic through social anthropological or historical writings, Indigenous ontologies or cosmologies. For those interested in generalisations, there is the problem of regional and temporal variability in cultural practice, yet the book has nothing on the Pacific region or the continents of Africa and South America. Asia is represented by one chapter on a single cave in the Philippines, and there is also a very brief overview that extols the potential of underwater cave research in Australia and South Africa. What of the considerable differences in how past peoples across the globe conceptualised how the world operates, as informed by ethnographic texts? This volume could have been an opportunity to address notions of liminality in relation to underwater caves, but this would have required consideration of both social anthropological and archaeological evidence. How do barely accessible ‘hidden’ places, or places that can be seen from a distance without being reachable beyond their entry points, bridge known and unknown worlds? How do different cultures deal with such liminal places? And how can archaeology be informed by such notions? Such questions are clearly of central interest to the topic of this monograph but are not delved into, and their silence speaks loud. Instead, the chapters are largely restricted to presentations of underwater dives and archaeological records in the Southeastern USA, the cenotes of Central America and a few deep caves in Europe. Generalisations about the use of underwater and deep caves are largely informed by those very particular regional traditions. Concepts such as ‘votive offerings’ and ‘reverence’ are applied here in contexts far from that in which they were first developed, risking anachronism. What is needed instead is an understanding of local cosmologies derived from ethnographic and archaeological sources, alongside the unpacking of religious notions applied from our own culture(s). Aboriginal Australians of the past 200 years do not conceptualise or interact with hidden places and caves—let alone underground caves—in the same ways as people in North America or Europe, for example. Understanding the very notion of ritual and how we tend to position it in opposition to domestic practice is important here. To take a further example from Aboriginal Australia, it is not necessarily the place itself that calls for the restrictions of ritual behaviour, but the knowledge that comes with it. A place may be accessible to all members of a community at the same time as some of its associated meanings are highly restricted or context-bound. Religious rituals may variably be undertaken in restricted or public places, depending on the status of the associated knowledge and social performances. The resulting archaeological signatures thus do not necessarily speak directly to the secrecy or sacredness of this place vs that place, but sometimes rather of the contexts of use and social engagements relative to numinous presences (see also McNiven & Wright Reference McNiven and Wright2008). Without considering such issues, the kinds of overarching generalisations often explicitly made in this volume—that underwater caves (and rock art, as stated in one chapter) equals religious rituals—cannot really be made.
Having said this, there are useful lessons to be learnt from this monograph, both in terms of the great value of underwater caves to preserve perishable, and thus rarely accessible, cultural materials, and management practices. I must admit that I am still baffled by how, in some countries, cultural objects remain unprotected by heritage legislation (e.g. when those sites and objects occur on private land where the law sometimes does not apply), and how Indigenous descendants fail to be recognised by the State as rightful owners. But these are even bigger topics that require more poignant discussion.
