A submerged monolith in the Sicilian Channel (central Mediterranean Sea): Evidence for Mesolithic human activity Emanuele Lodolo a, ⁎, Zvi Ben-Avraham b,c a Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale (OGS), Trieste, Italy b Department of Earth Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Israel c Charney School of Marine Sciences, University of Haifa, Israel abstract article info Article history: Received 26 April 2015 Received in revised form 1 July 2015 Accepted 4 July 2015 Available online xxxx Keywords: Sicilian Channel Shallow banks High-resolution bathymetry Underwater surveys Petrographic analysis Radiometric ages Submerged monolith Mesolithic human activity The ancient geography of the Mediterranean Basin was profoundly changed by the increase in sea level following the Last Glacial Maximum. This global event has led to the retreat of the coastlines, especially in lowland areas and shallow shelves, such as the Sicilian Channel. The NW sector of this shelf, known as Adventure Plateau, is studded by isolated shoals mostly composed of Late Miocene carbonate rocks and by some volcanic edifices. These shoals, until at least the Early Holocene, formed an archipelago of several islands separated by stretches of extremely shallow sea. One of these submerged features – the Pantelleria Vecchia Bank – located 60 km south of Sicily, has been extensively surveyed using geophysical and geological methods. It is composed of two main shoals, connected seaward by a rectilinear ridge which encloses an embayment. Here we present morpho- logical evidence, underwater observations, and results of petrographic analysis of a man-made, 12 m long mono- lith resting on the sea-floor of the embayment at a water depth of 40 m. It is broken into two parts, and has three regular holes: one at its end which passes through from part to part, the others in two of its sides. The monolith is composed of calcirudites of Late Pleistocene age, as determined from radiocarbon measurements conducted on several shell fragments extracted from the rock samples. The same age and composition characterize the metre-size blocks forming the rectilinear ridge. The rest of the rocks composing the shoals are mostly Tortonian limestones–sandstones, as revealed by their fossil content. Extrapolating ages from the local sea level curve, we infer that seawater inundated the inner lands at 9350 ± 200 year B.P., the upper limit which can be reasonably taken for the site abandonment. This discovery provides evidence for a significant Mesolithic human activity in the Sicilian Channel region. © 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd. 1. Introduction An abundant number of archaeological and geological data ac- quired in several coastal areas of the Mediterranean Basin represent the evidence that it has undergone major changes in sea level during the glacial-interglacial cycles (e.g., Lambeck and Chappell, 2001; Lambeck and Purcell, 2005; Antonioli et al., 2009; Auriemma and Solinas, 2009). After the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), around 19,000 year B.P., when the land area of Europe was ~40% larger than it is now, a relatively abrupt global rise in sea-level took place, estimated to be of 125 ± 5 m, as determined by correcting observed sea-level changes for glacio-hydro-isostatic contributions (e.g., Fleming et al., 1998; Mix et al., 2001; Siddall et al., 2003; Lambeck et al., 2004; Clark et al., 2009). The Sicilian Channel is one of the shallow shelves of the central Med- iterranean region where the consequences of changing sea-level were most dramatic and intense, as also occurred in part of the Aegean Sea, the northern Adriatic, and the Tunisia and Malta platforms. The Sicilian Channel is geologically part of the northern African continental shelf (Fig. 1) and lies mostly under shallow water, with the exception of three NW-trending, relatively deep troughs (the Pantelleria, Malta and Linosa grabens) produced since the Early Pliocene by rift-related pro- cesses (e.g., Reuther and Eisbacher, 1985; Boccaletti et al., 1987; Cello, 1987; Civile et al., 2010). This tectonic extension was also responsible of the formation of the two volcanic islands of Pantelleria and Linosa, and other submerged volcanic edifices lying along the eastern margin of the Adventure Plateau (Calanchi et al., 1989; Rotolo et al., 2006; Lodolo et al., 2012). It occupies the north-western sector of the Sicilian Channel, where available oil exploratory wells have shown that the sed- imentary sequence ranges from Triassic to Plio-Quaternary, with vari- ous hiatuses associated with long periods of aerial exposition and/or erosion (Civile et al., 2014). The Adventure Plateau is the shallowest part of the entire Sicilian Channel, and is punctuated by several isolated banks, some of them rising up to less than 10 m below sea level (Colantoni et al., 1985). During the LGM, the Adventure Plateau was part of the former Sicily mainland, forming a peninsula (the Adventure Peninsula) bulging towards south into the Sicilian Channel, and Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 3 (2015) 398–407 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: elodolo@ogs.trieste.it (E. Lodolo). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2015.07.003 2352-409X/© 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd. 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