Geoarchaeological Proxies of Late Holocene Sea Level Rise: Marine Transgression and the Archaeological Record of the Delmarva Peninsula

Summary

Understanding the magnitude of sea level rise over the past century is a hot topic in the Chesapeake Bay region. The research presented in this paper combines 20th-century aerial imagery, 19th-century land use data, and geoarchaeological information associated with various coastal archaeological sites to provide a high-resolution marine transgression record spanning the past two centuries. Tide gauge models have suggested that there has been ~1 foot (30cm) to ~1.5 feet (49cm) of sea level rise in the Chesapeake Bay over the past century. Some researchers have even stated that the rate of sea level rise in the Middle Atlantic region over the past century is greater than at any moment during the past 2,000 years. The geoarchaeological research in this presentation shows how tide gauge models for the Chesapeake Bay region have greatly overestimated the amount of historic relative marine transgression. This research also focuses on understanding the geological parameters of sea level rise during the Holocene and provides a geoarchaeological calibration tool to better understand recent sea level change.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Geoarchaeology of Submerged, Intertidal, And Wetland Places: Advances In Method And Theory of Prehistoric Archaeology Underwater 2015 -- Part 2   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage