January Lecture
Dr. Lisa Sonnenburg – OAS President and Cultural Resource Management Advisor for Lake Superior National Marine Conservation Area
January 8, 2026 @ 7:30pm via zoom – Register Here
Title: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, or I Can’t Believe It’s Not Shipwrecks! The Submerged History of Industrialization in the Great Lakes
Abstract: Underwater archaeology is most commonly associated with shipwrecks, and more recently, early Holocene submerged archaeological landscapes have been garnering more attention. However, there is a whole other range of underwater archaeological sites in the Great Lakes that garner less attention but are no less interesting. The Great Lakes and its associated watercourses have been a vital route of transportation since deglaciation. For thousands of years, activities such as trade, mining, hunting and fishing have all relied on these waterbodies, which would eventually become industrialized after the arrival of European settlers. While shipwrecks provide a partial view of the changes in transportation and trade as a result of industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Great Lakes also holds the remains of other forms of transportation and its associated infrastructure. Submerged trains, cars, planes, docks, wharves and bridges can provide additional insight into changes in landscape, economies and culture of the Great Lakes region over the past two hundred years.
Bio: Lisa has been studying submerged archaeological sites in the Great Lakes since 2004 and has managed to work on projects related to four of the five Great Lakes. Her goal in the next five years is to add the last Great Lake (Michigan) to the list. She first became interested in underwater archaeology during her undergraduate degree at Lakehead University and was fortunate to pursue submerged landscape archaeology research during her graduate degrees at McMaster University, working on the Rideau Canal and Rice Lake. She then received a SSHRC Postdoctoral fellowship which enabled her to work with Dr. John O’Shea on submerged caribou hunting structures in Lake Huron. She then spent five years at Stantec Consulting as a project archaeologist and research coordinator before joining Parks Canada in 2020.
Currently, Lisa is the President of the Ontario Archaeological Society and the Cultural Resource Management Advisor for Lake Superior National Marine Conservation Area. She is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology at Lakehead University. She first fell in love with Lake Superior’s north shore in a past life as a figure skating instructor over 25 years ago and is very happy to be back living and working on this beautiful landscape on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe people.