 Brilliant, thanks very much Vince and I also want to thank Jeff as well for the for the conference alongside Vince for getting us out of isolation at last to come and talk about these amazing projects together and Danielle as well who's been working behind the scenes making sure it runs smoothly. So today I wanted to give you an introduction and update from the ACROSS project another ERC funded project but this one's only a small one it's the starting ground and we're just hitting our stride with the project or we were until lockdown. So we're going to continue with the global theme that started this morning and the beyond bit of this conference because we're heading all the way across the island southeast Asia and Australia and as a project it's important to say that ACROSS acknowledges the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the traditional custodians of the seas and lands on which we undertake our research and we pay our respects to elders past present and emerging. There we go. So I have my name on this talk but like any big project this really represents a whole team of researchers and colleagues and it's important to say that this comes from not only here in the UK and at Southampton but in University of Huddersfield and with partners in Western Australia, the University of Western Australia and Literary University and the University of Domingo as well in Portugal. So thank you very much to all of them and for their input and our data that we're going to be talking about today mainly comes from the Australian Government and Geoscience Australia which is an absolutely incredible resource. They have so much data available and I recommend anyone who's interested to go and have a look at it but many thanks to them as well. So the ACROSS project is an ERC funded project studying some of the earliest seafaring in global history and trying to get to those big questions of human origins and think about our changing planet. So we're studying seafaring from Sunda, Ireland, Southeast Asia to Seoul which is modern-day Australia and New Guinea and we're looking in deep time. To do this we need to understand the changing land and seascapes and the now submerged paleo landscapes in the region as well. Of course this is much easier on the Australian chef than it is in Ireland, Southeast Asia because of the question of tectonics so that is where we have started. This approach combines multiple forms of ocean and earth science and archaeology but also genetics as well. So it really brings these different lines different narratives and datasets together and that's the main goal at the end. At the moment they're still slightly disparate but we're beginning to bring them together and it also recognises the importance of indigenous history and knowledge and it's really important to say right from the offset that I'm an outsider being a European researcher. I come from a western scientific understanding of the world and so for me this research question includes the nation of trying to understand seafaring within a framework of global human migration but I also accept respect and acknowledge different ontologies including many people's beliefs that they've always been on country. So whilst the chronology and the notion of arrival of people in Sehol is debated the earlier state ranges from archaeological science suggests people were in Sehol by around 50,000 years ago and maybe as early as 65,000 years ago or earlier. Now different forms of knowledge and different ontologies can be difficult to bring together to coalesce but doing so brings this richness to the narratives that we can tell both about early seafaring and coastal activities and coastal change specifically for this project but also more generally for ocean and earth science sustainability and think about the human past and it's worth saying that with the onset of the United Nations decade of ocean science for sustainable development running from 2021 to 2030 getting a quick plug in there we highlight the need for the inclusion of these integrated interdisciplinary approaches to understanding human relationships with the sea and the importance of maritime and underwater cultural heritage in which we know can be and is preserved within these submerged paleo landscapes on the continental shelf and such paleo landscape research on the submerged shelf talks to multiple identified sustainable development goals or SDGs of the decade so we have much to do and potential as archaeologists to contribute greatly to this period. So what have we been doing so far as a project? Well we've been researching changing landscapes and seascapes to understand both seafaring and life on the coast in deep time running powerful ocean circulation models like NEMO which are essential to global climate models and on standing climate change through the glacial cycles from marine isotope stage six to about two really that's the period that we've been looking at alongside these ocean circulation models we're mapping the paleo tides with changing sea levels using mic 21 and the changing geomorphology of the paleo coast putting that together to help inform us of the changing coastal environment and the changing ecosystems but also of available resources and potential lived habitats. Okay so we've been using the paleo drift models and examining maritime routing into Sahur playing with the models to include propulsion and various speeds and looking at windage and small crafts to study the effect of the changing monsoon and seasonality and water crossings and here's an example of some of our latest work which is looking at the fastest crossings throughout the regions. Now what I'm going to do now is focus on this area here because this is one of the ones of most interest looking between Timor and the Australian shelf so this is one of Bertels original routes southern routes into Australia. We've also been studying the rich oral traditions and indigenous narratives about only seafaring boats and changing coasts and if you want to learn more about that I would highly recommend looking at the project website but I can't talk about that as well today. Okay so really the the thing is to understand movement and seafaring between Cinder and Sahur in deep time we need to first understand where those coasts were and in case you're wondering this is where the submerged landscapes and the lost frontiers part of this research comes in. A big part of this project involves using offshore industry data and 2D and 3D seismic analysis to understand the changing nature of the now submerged coastal landscape to better understand sea level change to locate the paleo-coast and in order to help us interpret changing features and changing environments and this is what I really want to focus on today. Right now I think this might move if I click on it no it won't because it's a pointer so let me just get rid of the laser pointer. Okay so to understand this really early and important maritime activity we need to understand what the landscape was like and what the seascape was like and so we need to take this multidisciplinary approach and as you can see it's really about this changing dynamic land and seascape. So we're nearing halfway on this project and I'm going to show you just a few of the datasets we've been working on. We initially started concentrating on the Bonaparte Gulf which is this region here you can see it on the tiny inset. It looks like a small kind of gulf but it's absolutely huge but we've also started spreading around the coast looking at this section here the Arafura Sea and the Gulf of Carpentaria and we've been looking at the data and accessing the data in the last few weeks and putting that together so we'll have to wait for another seminar to show that work. But the Bonaparte Gulf is perhaps the first place to start it's absolutely full of data so it's a great place to start looking and you know the thing is that I'm particularly interested in around the timeframe of 71 to 59,000 years ago. So marine isotope stage four which coincides with the early stated archaeology of potentially as old as 65,000 to go which is Magia Baby which you can read about in the clocks in their town 2019 paper. But why start with the Bonaparte Gulf? Okay so it's probably as close as possible to that earliest site but also because it's if you're interested in the Bursals routes which I showed you a second ago into Sahul this is one of the most important routes as part of a crossing from Timor or Rote on the center shelf into Sahul itself. But my interest in this region from a paleo landscape perspective was also formed after discussions with Nick Fleming about the Sirius expedition at a Splashkos conference in Brisbane many years ago now where I hope he won't mind me retelling this because he'll probably do it much better at another point but he said to me that Rhys Jones commented that if Nick could remove the water he'd find him an early site. In 1982 when Nick Fleming and his team explored the submerged quaternary landscape of the Kutamundra Shoals which is up here just northwest of Darwin 240 kilometers northwest of Darwin. This was one of the first surveys of a submerged quaternary landscape in Australasia to recognize the cultural importance of these offshore landscapes both for understanding movement into Sahul in deep time but also the changing coastal environment and the potential for preserved archaeology on the submerged shelf. So here we are nearly 40 years on survey methods have developed a pace and wider research into submerged landscapes around Australasia is developing momentum with underwater finds by the Deep History of Sea Country project that Jonathan Benjamin is going to be talking about later this morning and actually showing that archaeology can be preserved and can be found and the available data is somewhat different from the early 80s another reason for choosing this region and luckily for us there's been lots and lots of offshore industry in this region. So we're understanding and integrated sorry we're undertaking an integrated interpretive study of the evolving submerged landscapes for late Pleistocene of the North Australian shelf using oil and gas industry 2d and 3d seismic data together with some core borehole data to determine lowest low stand paleo environments and shoreline positions over the last glacial period from MIS 1 to about 5e but with a focus on the low stand of MIS 4. These are the data sets we've analyzed so far in this region with thanks to Geoscience Australia and Anthony Folk and Justin Dix and we have 16 3d data sets high res 2d data and hundreds of 2d lines to stitch them together and this is a big country as you know so big data is also required and the approach of trying to get this question scale it's something that came up again and again yesterday but just to give you an indication of the size of the Gulf of the Bonaparte Gulf I just stuck the British or some of the British Charles in there and you could just really get a sense of of the scale of this okay back to the data itself so we have lots of data but not enough cores which is generally always the problem and this was highly highlighted just a moment to go as well and this certainly is going to be the next challenge and the next big project in this region and it's worth doing and it's worth funding um but we do have a series of cores and dates that we've recently recalibrated with big thanks to Michael Grant and they help provide a boundary or boundary data to calibrate the seismics and to interpret sedimentation rates it's also helped us to pin down our sea level curves the issue with using this industry data as you all know though is that we're only really interested within with the top a few seconds and this wasn't collected for archaeologists or people interested in lake quaternary paleo landscape study so it's taken a lot of seismic processing and if you want to hear more about this I would definitely put you in touch with Anthony Fogg who did this work for us and he'll happily discuss the merits of the inverse queue and various other stages of processing one aspect of this research has been the application of new methods especially in near-surface seismic data analysis and interpretation which will feed back into industry and marine science but what it has enabled is an extensive 2d and 3d seismic reflection database to be created for the northwest australian shelf centering on the bonaparte gulf using publicly available archives interpretation of the seismic data is constrained by data stratigraphy in shallow cores with lower bounds determined from all-in-a-gas wellbores and we can then reference this against relative sea levels to identify sub aqueous or sub aerial position so marine isotope stages 1 to 6 are identified within the top about 90 meters of events below the seabed high resolution 2d lines are available in the portrayal sub basin and these lines have proved key to understanding their geomorphology over the past 125,000 years as they allow high stands those are the thin parallel the thin parallel low energy environment seismic reflection lines and the low stands which are the incised chaotic and intra-channel on lapping seismic reflection vents so it allows these periods to be interpreted it's possible to interpret high stands associated with mis-1, mis-3 and mis-5 and low stands for mis-2 and mis-4 okay so what you're looking at here are the mis-4 map sediment locations with the 80 meter contour outlined in pink it's so hard to see i'm sorry about that it's very very fine line so if we focus in on the mis-4 we have a geomorphological interpretation of an evolving coastal and fluvial emergent landscape we have correspondence to the present day 80 meter bathymetric contour plus minus three meters and tidal signatures are observed in the stratigraphy that are consistent with the present day 84 meter and 80 meter bathymetric contours and this is brilliant because this fits really nicely with the models produced earlier in the project by Kaye et al on the paleo tides for this period in this region we also have potential peak emergent land heights including i'll now do you need the pointer um including here the london dairy high this this bit here of around 20 meters the sehole platform along here of 70 meters and the bandiman rise of around 30 meters and contemporaneous depositional environments are identified as reef um along here and you can see them in here we've also got beaches estuarine deposits lagoonal and fluvial facies associated with the mis-4 low stand the spatial location of these environments is controlled primarily by relative sea level but and secondary content controls the sub aerial erosion due to ablation wave erosion and precipitation moving south into the gulf and you can see yeah you'll see here into this area here we see dramatically changing landscape fluvial systems uh major drainages several kilometers across estuarine and intertidal features so what we're looking at here are the impedance slices for the petrol 3d in the bonaparte gulf um so what you can see at the bottom here is high energy transport fluvial followed by low energy transport fluvial braiding to the northwest to estuarine conditions um then we don't have the mis-5 identified possibly the superior non-deposition then we have mis-4 which is fully estuarine um and we've got sort of submerged area with hinterlands uh supply of fluvial sediments from the southeast uh we also have the diffuse features which we are interpreting as indicating potential lagoonal environments um and then mis-2 to mis-1 again the mis-3 is not identified um but what we're seeing in mis-2 is high energy transport fluvial followed by low energy um transport fluvial and then mis-1 the transgression to create a fully open marine environment so where does this lead us well as archaeologists we're really interested in what this means in terms of the paleo landscape and potential areas for preservation and understanding coastal activity for example seafaring and also coastal ecology but quaternary scientific specialists are often very wary about doing this sort of image um this sort of reconstruction so our stress that is very much is an interpretation to give us some idea of what is going on um it's depicting a proposed schematic representation of the mis-4 landscape for the greater Bonaparte Gulf associated with the peak or dominant low stand of around 80 meters plus mine minus three meters relative sea level that's been interpreted in the present study a broad barrier to the northwest formed by the subairily exposed the whole platform forms an extensive region of islands inlets and channels which border a lagoon to the southeast of around approximately 40 000 kilometer square the lagoon is connected to the border shelf and the open sea via numerous seaways and a significant deep channel called the malita grave into the north there is potential for the development of extensive salt water or brackish marsh area to the southwest and southeast of the lagoon and microtidal estuary is present on the eastern paleo coastline where fluvial channels provide plastic input the margins of the lagoon are shallow enough for the development of isolated pinnacle carbonate reefs flanked by estuary sediments on exposed carbonate surfaces classification has developed associated with wave cut platforms and higher ground and it's really interesting thinking about that in terms of perhaps active landscapes moving further inland from the estuary the landscape changes from brackish to freshwater marsh and where the land is more elevated or surface drainage has improved this graze to open grassland with possible shrub and tree development beyond the lagoon there is a broad fringing shelf bordered by an archipelago of islands from the southwest to the northeast beyond the shelf edge isolated reef carbonate growth associated with the regeneration of the older platforms that were once there may be observed to the west of the area of london dairy high which is this area here forms a disconnected sorry we see a disconnected peninsula with occasional beaches forming encodes on the southern aspect down here development of tidal mud flats is observed on the northern aspects of a headland to the south of the london dairy high just here and the deep and deep water currents in this area are evidenced by the development also a development of current modified bedrooms and counter rights which we're seeing in here as well so think about present-day analogs much like carol earlier it's one way to help visualize and understand these environments so think about how they might have been today and this is just a first step in understanding the changing nature of the coastal environment we can see where the sediments are preserved across the Gulf and through this um geez that we might see preserved in these environments a future step could be identifying the best areas for further coring and study and it's outside of the scope of this project at the moment but at the same time it raises many questions about how to achieve this work so not only has the technology technology come on a long way in the last 40 years since the Kutumundra project but so has the awareness of the need to take a community-led approach to this sort of future work if these potential underwater sites are to be located and protected so this sort of large survey project crosses multiple communities states and countries waters it creates a challenge for how we do this kind of paleo landscape work at this scale in the future so the recently formed splosh network funded by INQUA has been created to discuss these specific challenges to the multitude of submerged landscape projects that's currently taking place in the southern hemisphere and we hope that this is going to help grow the discipline and drive research and publication in this region thank you very much i'm happy to answer any questions i know jeff has already turned on the camera so i'm sure my time is up well indeed and vince gaffney was supposed to be chairing but he seems to have locked himself out of the of the the internet so i'm stepping in to read out any questions that appear in the chat box right here we go one question from robin alibi could you elaborate a bit on the goals for the archaeogenetic work please um absolutely i can yes so i didn't talk about it today because partly because of the themes of what we um what we were talking about as the main conference but the idea is that we're looking at um looking at modern communities and we're looking at movement through the islands and uh through empty dna and y chromosome and also um whole genome as well and let's look at the distribution of different lines and to try and see if there is a geographic um a geographic pattern within that that might say something about where people travel to and from and of course so i'm not an archaeogeneticist this is one of the working groups on the project which is led by professor martin richards at university of punters field so it's um it's ongoing at the moment and um yeah you'll see there's lots and lots of work at the moment looking at um population genetics courses um it's one of those areas which is constantly tied to thinking about distribution of people and looking at movement through paleogeography so it it's yet another data strand that we're using to start thinking about movement in the region