Following the Shore: Refining Late Holocene Sea-Level change through Settlement Histories on Northern Quadra Island, B.C.

Summary

For people who rely on the ocean, changes in sea-level can have a profound effect on daily lives, connections to place, and identity. When we study sea-level from a broader or regional scale, we do not require the time and space specificity that is necessary to examine the effect of highly local sea-level change in a particular time and place. Thus, the regional sea-level curves that have been well-refined and developed, may not answer (or allow us) to understand and appreciate what this change had on lived lives, particularly in cases where sea-level changed up to several meters in an instant. Our research will detail how human settlement histories, intimately connected to sea-level, can provide a window into the effect sea-level change has on a finer scale that is not currently provided by broader models. Using an intensive coring and dating program in Waiatt and Kanish Bays, Quadra Island, we propose to evaluate how settlements expanded shoreward as sea-levels fell during the Late Holocene. This research will also serve as a test for coring methodology, and whether it can efficiently provide enough accurate data to be used elsewhere.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Archaeology of Stranded, Intertidal, and Submerged Shorelines on the Northwest Coast of North America

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16245