Coastal Environments in Archaeology: Ancient Life, Lore, and Landscapes

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Coastal Environments in Archaeology: Ancient Life, Lore, and Landscapes" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Coastal environments have been among the most crucial venues of human evolutionary and cultural history, yet more work is needed for clarifying the relevant archaeological evidence, cultural folklore and traditions, and long-term paleo-environmental sequences of changing coastlines and habitats. This session invites experts in coastal studies to compare their diverse findings about ancient life, lore, and landscapes in the world’s coastal zones, toward understanding the complex natural and cultural histories of coastal environments in a global perspective. The global-scale issues involve how people have adapted with changing coasts through variable periods of stability versus instability in climate, sea level, habitat ecology, cultural use of resource zones, population distributions, cross-regional migrations, and other aspects of urgent applicability in the world today and into the future.