Site Formation Processes in Marine Archaeological Sites: An Expanded Model for Shipwrecks and New Models for Submerged Settlements and Harbours

The cultural and natural processes shaping archaeological sites on land have been studied extensively in a variety of terrestrial environments and landscapes. This resulted in a basic model of cultural and natural accretion and depletion processes. In marine archaeology, shipwreck cultural and natural formation processes are quite well-researched and presented as basic models. This is not the case, however, for coastal and submerged settlements, and harbours, implicitly assumed to undergo processes identical to shipwrecks. Building on the wealth of data from the ‘natural laboratory’ of the Carmel coast in the Mediterranean, we present an expanded basic model for shipwreck formation processes and new basic models for coastal and submerged settlements, and harbours. These may guide detailed, location-specific, future research.