Being Sine Qua Non: Maritime Archeology and the Archaeology of the Cold War
J Mari Arch
Being Sine Qua Non: Maritime Archeology and the Archaeology of the Cold War
Todd A. Hanson 0
0 Los Alamos National Laboratory , MS J596, Los Alamos, NM 87545 , USA
-
Sine qua non translates as ‘‘without which, not’’ to describe the indispensable, absolutely
necessary, or essential nature of one thing to another. In my mind, no phrase better
characterizes the relationship of maritime archeology to the archaeology of the Cold War.
While mushroom clouds, ballistic missiles, and fallout shelters have long tended to
dominate our Cold War memory, the reality is that it was a conflict fought in the air and on
land, as well as at sea. This fact makes maritime archeology a constituent of the
archaeological study of the Cold War. And although maritime archeology can and does function
quite well without ever contributing to the archaeology of the Cold War, the reverse is not
true. Without maritime archeology, the archaeology of the Cold War is incomplete.
When JMA editor Annalies Corbin asked me to contribute this editorial, it was a task I
accepted with particular purpose. Having recently authored a textbook entitled The
Archaeology of the Cold War (2016), I am generally more familiar with that subject than
most, and logically more able than most to discuss aspects of the cross-disciplinary synergy
exemplified by the papers in this issue. Admittedly, I have a vested interest in championing
the archaeology of Cold War among maritime researchers whose interests are
geographically broad and whose focus of study can date back to the moment that humankind first set
to sea, so an opportunity to advocate for expanded cooperative archaeological research
between the two fields was simply too propitious to pass up.
The papers in this issue represent some of the best Cold War maritime archaeology
being practiced today. For example, the paper by Delgado, Elliott, Cantelas, and
Schwemmer in this volume turns out to be both a survey report of a deep water Cold War
wreck off the California coast and news of a Cooperative Research and Development
Agreement (CRADA) that was signed between NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and
Atmospheric Research and the Boeing Company. The CRADA gives NOAA researchers greater
access to advanced marine remote sensing technologies while helping Boeing understand
NOAA missions in order to offer better undersea technology research solutions. Yet
another paper in this issue by Delgado discusses the fate of the target ships used in the
Crossroads atomic tests after the tests were complete. Theirs is perhaps not the fate one
might have expected for such historically significant ships. Ultimately, all of the articles,
photos, and original source documents in this issue are illustrative of a sine qua non
relationship between the archaeology of the Cold War and maritime archeology; a
relationship that is enabled by a notable past, challenging present, and promising future.
A Notable Past
The archaeological study of the Cold War past examines what was undoubtedly one of the
most advanced and extensive military uses of the sea. The Cold War was, above all else, a
highly technological conflict. Cold War maritime technologies included devices like Sound
Surveillance System (SOSUS), a technology deployed in 1952 by Britain and the United
States which used underwater arrays of hydrophones, principles of triangulation, and the
physics of the ocean’s deep sound channel to detect over distances of hundreds of miles the
acoustic signals created by Soviet submarines en route to and from the Atlantic and their
Barents Sea ports of call. The Cold War also led to the development of the world’s first
nuclear powered submarine, the USS Nautilus in 1955, which changed the very character
of submarine service. Reaching unexpectedly even into contemporary life, the Cold War
revolutionized terrestrial and nautical navigation with creation of GPS, a global positioning
system originally devised to provide the precise navigation necessary for the launch of
American submarine-based intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles at sea. While not all
of these technologies left behind archaeological sites to study, their development,
deployment, and use occasionally created some very extensive and complex sites, such as
those associated with nuclear weapons testing.
The foundational maritime archaeology research behind the papers in this issue actually
began in the summer of 1989, only months before the Cold War’s end, when the National
Park Service’s Submerged Cultural Resource Unit research team began their study of one
of the Cold War’s most famous underwater archaeological sites: Bikini Atoll. Invited by
the governing Bikini Council to assess the historical significance of the ‘‘ghost fleet,’’ a
collection of American, German, and Japanese ships sunk in the atoll’s lagoon in July 1946
as part of the Operation Crossroads atomic weapons tests, NPS researchers conducted two
fieldwork sessions, one in the summer of 1989 and ano (...truncated)