Ground Truthing the Future: Using Contact Era Archaeological Information to Test and Communicate Sea Level Change

Summary

Coastal North Carolina has 3,375 miles of shoreline, much of it fronting low-lying lands increasingly vulnerable to flooding and inundation exacerbated by a long-term process of sea-level rise. This vulnerability has made the area a fruitful laboratory for environmental science studies of sea level change and its environmental and societal effects. But the issue of forecasting sea level rise for public policy and land use management has become controversial due in part to the difficulty of describing sea level forecasts as an extrapolation of demonstrated past change and its effects on human activities. Much of the affected areas have well researched contact era Native American and early Colonial sites that offer quantitative and qualitative evidence of both the extent and effects of historic sea level change. The researchers used such archaeological site information to augment environmental sciences studies to enhance the communicability of sea level change information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2015   •
• Poster Session 2

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 554