Reflecting on submerged landscape archaeology in Australia and prospects for international collaboration

At the peak of the Last Glacial Maximum, global sea levels were as low as −130 m below current levels. Over time, sea levels rose, inundating 2 million km2 of the Australian continental landmass. As Australian archaeology moves forward, the submerged cultural landscapes of the continental shelf must be considered. Historically, underwater archaeology in Australia has been focused on shipwrecks and colonial periods. However, there is increasing interest in the deep time archaeology of submerged Indigenous landscapes because of their significance for a range of major research questions. There has been some important work in this space, including the first attempts to locate submerged Indigenous archaeology at the Cootamundra Shoals by Flemming (Citation1983), establishing the potential for submerged landscape archaeology in Murujuga by Dortch (Citation2002), efforts to characterise potential site preservation by Nutley (Citation2014), and the identification of the first two submerged Indigenous sites in Murujuga by the Deep History of Sea Country project team (Benjamin et al. Citation2020).