ABSTRACT
Many archaeological sites are located on the west coast of Florida and many of them have basal levels that are below sea level. The probable existence of large numbers of archaeological sites on inundated coasts remains unproven because a significant amount of evidence needed to reconstruct prehistoric settlement patterns and adaptations cannot be collected by conventional underwater archaeological methods. Most people consider underwater archaeology to be synonymous with shipwrecks which are then equated with treasure hunting—an identification that inhibits scholarly and scientific research of all wet sites. Wet sites can occur almost anywhere but their locations usually conform to regular archaeological distributional patterns. Wet sites are of several types: drowned terrestrial sites, shipwrecks, sites inundated by dam impoundments, deliberate or accidental incorporation of cultural materials into water saturated deposits, and dry sites that became waterlogged due to a rise in the water table.
