Abstract

In the last 60 years archaeology has been moving both on land and at sea in the attempt to understand the ways humans have inhabited different environments in the past. Particularly, maritime archaeology is carried out at the dynamic edge where these contrasting environments meet. Moving ‘in’ and ‘across’ them involves different skills and a dynamic understanding of their contrasting mediums. In most cases maritime archaeologists get involved in diving, which fully contrasts with the experience of walking. Like the inhabitants of the environments they attempt to understand, archaeologists end up appropriating these environments as they develop skills in them. However, in human underwater exploration there seem to be different forms of appropriation. The general tendency in maritime archaeology, like in other sciences where measurement of space is privileged, Euclidean dimensions seems to direct how scientists move. Ultimately, this influences how they understand their own ways of moving in the environment and the relationship other animals have developed with it. This paper presents ethnographic work carried out with land and underwater archaeologists both in Chile and Scotland. It attempts to explore how archaeologists move at sea looking at how this might contrast with the movements of the discipline on land. The analysis will pay attention to other non-scientific forms of diving and walking. I will argue that in underwater archaeology there is a constant tension between the dimensional understanding of space and the experience of the environment as a dynamic field of forces.