Archaeologica.org

Watching with sadness the destruction on the east coast of New Jersey I could not help but observe the amount of sand that was brought onshore by the storm surge. The bulldozers were beginning the massive job of clearing the sand deposits that appeared to be very clean and sorted. This brought to mind a paper by Lowery describing archaeological lithics ascribed to be Clovis and the associated sand deposits purported to be aeolian loess on the Delmarva peninsula deposited during the Younger Dryas Chronozone (YDC).

My question is, how certain can we be that these deposits are wind not wave deposits?


Darrin L. Lowery, et. al.; 2010

Late Pleistocene upland stratigraphy of the western Delmarva Peninsula, USA

Hi Farpoint -

Fortunately there were few deaths.

Aside from storms, there were also impact mega-tsunami.
Dallas Abbott has published some data on those from this general area.

I may be mistaken (as impact-mega-tsunami is not my specialty) but I believe that deep water shells and fossils are the way that these are differentiated from aeolian deposits. In any case, I am still waiting for formal USGS publication of their cores from the Carolinas.

As far as the deposits go, if you know of any sites or likely paleo submerged sites, why not go beach-combing?