Burning Libraries: Environmental Impacts on Heritage and Science

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carole Nash. Heather Wholey.

The U.S. Middle Atlantic region, known for its rich archaeological record and diverse topographic settings, is experiencing a range of climate change impacts: sea level rise and coastal erosion; increased precipitation and flooding in some areas; and mountain-based forest fires associated with drought in other areas. Documented paleostratigraphic and palynological studies throughout the region provide a record of late Pleistocene/Holocene environmental response to changing climate, confirming...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Dawson. Elinor Graham. Joanna Hambly.

Around the world, thousands of archaeological sites are threatened by coastal processes. Although many countries have successfully implemented schemes to address threats from development, this is not the case for sites at risk from natural processes. Without developers to fund mitigation projects, the scale of the problem appears enormous, and it is difficult for individual agencies to commit to preserving, or even recording, everything at risk. Systems are needed to update information and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Heilen. Jeffrey Altschul. Friedrich Lueth.

Globally, climate change represents one of the largest impending threats to archaeological research and heritage preservation. Rising sea levels and increased storm intensity will cause inundation and erosion of coastal and island resources across the globe. Climate change impacts will increase in their frequency and severity in the coming decades, resulting in compromised integrity or outright destruction of thousands of heritage resources, many of which may never be identified before they are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Miller.

Along Florida’s 8,000 miles of shoreline, nearly 4,000 archaeological sites and over 600 recorded historic cemeteries are at risk from coastal erosion and rising sea levels. The matter remains complex in Florida where despite the 20 percent higher rate of sea level rise compared to the global average, "climate change" remains politically taboo. This paper will outline ongoing efforts to engage the public in monitoring coastal sites and the creation of the Heritage Monitoring Scout (HMS Florida)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Bates. Walter Witschey. Craig Rose. Mary Farrell. Erin West.

The Chesapeake Bay, one of the largest marine estuaries in the world, serves as a microcosm of the forces of shoreline environmental change such as sea level rise, land subsidence and erosion and the impacts that such change has on the archaeological record. Using shoreline analysis, empirical observations and predictive modeling of four counties along the Bay, this project seeks to establish an understanding of the impacts on known archaeological sites in the study area as well as to assess...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vibeke Vandrup Martens. Michel Vorenhout. Ove Bergersen. Paula Utigard Sandvik. Jørgen Hollesen.

How fast do archaeological deposits, soil features and artefacts degrade? Is it possible to preserve archaeological remains in situ without significant loss of information potential? Climate change causing higher temperatures, increased and more concentrated precipitation events, changes from snow to rain, may lead to an irrevocable loss of information. Even small changes in the conditions of deposition, as caused by the global environmental development or local structural changes, may...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Konrad Smiarowski. Michael Nielsen. Christian Madsen.

This presentation is an attempt to illustrate the scale of climate induced loss of organic preservation at Norse/Viking farmsteads in the Eastern Settlement of Southwest Greenland. For over a century now Norse Greenland has been associated with well preserved sites, where wooden artifacts, bones and even textiles have been recovered. Archaeological investigations at sites that previously reported excellent preservation conditions suggest that recent climatic changes have had a wide and severe...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruth Maher. Robert Friel. Lindsey Kemp. Julie Bond. Stephen Dockrill.

Coastal erosion sites contain the same complexity as any other site; however, the sequences are often truncated and the recovery conditions require adaptive approaches. Although these sites are eroding, there is a need for equal rigor in their recording. The coastal erosion site at Swandro, Rousay, Orkney, has been recorded using a variety of georeferenced data sets. This paper examines the potential of micro-analysis of the 3-dimensional coordinate records of artifacts and geo-referenced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabel Rivera-Collazo. Tom Dawson.

As a tropical, oceanic island in the northeastern Caribbean Sea, Puerto Rico is feeling the effects of climate change. Rising sea level, increased storminess, and unpredictable sudden weather events combine with heavy coastal occupation and little or no coherent development planning, to increase social vulnerability to coastal change. The burden of economic problems that the Island is suffering from also increases the complexities of working towards resiliency. Within this context, coastal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas McGovern.

Rising sea levels, increasing storminess, melting glaciers, rising soil temperatures, and increased wild fires are all increasingly affecting archaeological sites worldwide. Accelerated destruction of sites with organic preservation poses a dual threat to global and local cultural heritage and to archaeological evidence that is becoming recognized as key global change data. As archaeologists increasingly participate in local, national, and international efforts to promote genuine long term...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leslie Reeder-Myers. Torben Rick.

Shell middens, like other forms of coastal cultural heritage, are heavily threatened by sea level rise, climate change, and human land use. These sites, however, store information about these same challenges in the past. We present results from recent research near the mouth of the Rhode River, a small sub-estuary of Chesapeake Bay in eastern North America. We chose an area we knew well, having worked on the 31 previously recorded shell middens, to test the importance of more specialized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hans Harmsen. Christian Madsen. Henning Matthiesen. Bo Elberling. Jørgen Hollesen.

Documenting and evaluating the rate of deterioration at coastal archaeological sites presents a number of fundamental challenges in the Arctic. In Greenland for example, increasing soil temperatures, perennial thaws, coastal erosion, storm surges and pioneer plant species such as dwarf willow and dwarf birch are observed as increasingly detrimental to the long-term preservation of archaeological deposits and features found scattered along the country’s west coast and extensive inner fjord...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Kaplan.

In 1978 archaeologists partially excavated a frozen Middle Dorset Paleoeskimo midden on Avayalik Island, a far outer island at the tip of Labrador, Canada’s uninhabited northern coast. They recovered hundreds of organic artifacts unlike any found in Labrador’s other Middle Dorset sites, which contain only lithic tools. Faunal remains suggested a North Atlantic quite different from that of the present day. In 2016 Kaplan returned to Avayalik and documented the ongoing destruction of the site....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anastasia Steffen. Rachel Loehman.

Recent wildland fires of western North America are occurring in some landscapes at intensities, severities, and extents that are far outside the historical record. These fires and their ecological and social consequences are highly-reported, and there is emerging awareness of the potential for large and severe wildfires to alter or destroy cultural legacies in fire-prone landscapes. Contemporary anthropogenic land use and management have contributed to altered wildfire regimes, but this can be...