Beyond Triage: Prioritizing Responses to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Beyond Triage: Prioritizing Responses to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Environmental impacts associated with climate change threaten archaeological resources—documented and undocumented—in all types of settings. Accelerated loss is documented for coastal and interior regions around the world, so archaeologists and preservation planners are now in a position of making difficult decisions about the types of resources and settings that should be prioritized for study. Ideally, this work should be proactive and collaborative, involving a range of stakeholders who can make informed decisions that encompass not only known resources, but areas with potential to yield new information. This session addresses approaches to prioritization in the face of limited funding and time.

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  • Documents (7)

Documents
  • First Came the Fires: Valles Caldera Landscape Futures in a Changing Climate (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Bergman. Kelsey, M. Reese. Anastasia Steffen. Nicholas, L. Jarman.

    This is an abstract from the "Beyond Triage: Prioritizing Responses to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Jemez Mountains in north-central New Mexico have experienced devastating wildfires due to the intersection of climate change and twentieth-century forest management practices. In the past decade 63% of the Valles Caldera National Preserve and 50% of recorded archaeological sites have been...

  • Monitoring, Planning, and Treating Archaeological Sites for Climate Change (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris McDaid. Patrick Barry. Courtney Birkett.

    This is an abstract from the "Beyond Triage: Prioritizing Responses to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Fort Eustis portion of Joint Base Langley-Eustis is a peninsula of 8,000 acres bounded by Skiffes Creek, the Warwick River, and the James River on Virginia's coastal plain. The installation has 233 identified archaeological sites. Thirty-one sites are subject to erosion by the surrounding...

  • Prioritizing Site Loss in the Delaware Bay, USA, Using Probabalistic Modeling (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Wholey. Daria Nikitina. Katherine Dowling.

    This is an abstract from the "Beyond Triage: Prioritizing Responses to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Delaware Bay is the second largest estuary along the US Atlantic coast and is experiencing some of the gravest effects from climate-driven sea level rise along the East Coast. Certain areas along the bay have the lowest mean elevation in the USA and are experiencing both accelerated sea level...

  • Prioritizing What We Don’t Know: Climate Change as a Catalyst for Upland Survey (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Carole Nash.

    This is an abstract from the "Beyond Triage: Prioritizing Responses to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The upland forests of the Appalachians are among the most diverse natural communities in the temperate world, providing the setting for a study of change and flexibility as an essential feature of existence, both for precontact and historic cultures. However, upland archaeology has lagged due to...

  • So Many Sites, So Little Time: Shell Heaps on the Maine Coast (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice R. Kelley. Bonnie Newsom. Jacquelynn Miller. Kristin Schild.

    This is an abstract from the "Beyond Triage: Prioritizing Responses to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climate change induced impacts (accelerated sea level rise, increased storm frequency and intensity, and additional freeze/thaw events) are destroying shell heap, or midden, sites all along the Maine coast. Some sites described 20 years ago are now gone. With approximately 2,000 known sites, it...

  • Vulnerability and Values: Things to Consider for Site Prioritization (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Jensen.

    This is an abstract from the "Beyond Triage: Prioritizing Responses to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological sites are threatened in various ways by accelerating environmental change. The scale and urgency of the threat requires new models for funding, education and recruitment of staff, engagement with the public, and long-term curation of rescued samples. One critical issue is how to...

  • The Water and the Land: How the Private Sector and Government Work Together to Plan for Climate Change Impacts to Cultural Resources (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Seibel.

    This is an abstract from the "Beyond Triage: Prioritizing Responses to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Government, inclusive of the local, state, and national levels, is the largest aggregate landholder in the United States and has under its direct jurisdiction the largest array of cultural resources in the country, not to mention the cultural resources under jurisdictional oversight. As such,...