Interdisciplinary analysis of partially submerged pre-Columbian sites of Martinique, French West Indies. Research issues, methodology and further perspectives

In the actual alarming context of global warming and environmental change, all eyes are focused on the relative sea level rise and its catastrophic consequences. The impacts of this phenomenon on contemporary societies are extremely diversified. Among them the programmed disappearance in the coming decades of a large part of the coastal cultural heritage requires a specific reflection. The French West Indies are, because of their geographical position and their insularity, dramatically exposed to the coastal regression. This phenomenon of exposure to marine risks is not new. Since the last Pleniglacial period (18,000 BP), marine transgression is estimated to about +120 meters around the Caribbean basin. By developing a diachronic geoarchaeological approach to the material evidence of the submerged history of Martinique, we aim to determine the erosive and relative sea level processes behind the mobility of the shoreline as well as the relationship to the ocean of a corpus of three pre-Columbian deposits distributed on this territory. We will develop an original geoarchaeological methodological approach to the paleoenvironmental, taphonomic and predictive characterization of these sites, witnesses of the holocene land-sea interface in perpetual mutation. Thus, this holistic and unreleased approach in the pre-Columbian context of Martinique raises a plurality of research issues related to the prehistoric occupation modalities of this space. It must therefore fall within a solid methodological framework that must be reproducible on the scale of the entirety of the pre-Columbian submerged Antillean deposits. From sedimentary studies to three-dimensional paleoenvironmental simulations and from archaeologists to the actors of cultural meditation, a plurality of perspectives should emerge from our study which strive to contribute to an interdisciplinary archaeology of West Indies paleolandscapes