Being Sine Qua Non: Maritime Archeology and the Archaeology of the Cold War

Journal of Maritime Archaeology, Apr 2016

Todd A. Hanson

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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)


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Todd A. Hanson. Being Sine Qua Non: Maritime Archeology and the Archaeology of the Cold War, Journal of Maritime Archaeology, 2016, pp. 5-8, Volume 11, Issue 1, DOI: 10.1007/s11457-016-9156-5