Coastal Erosion Management in Archaeology: Turning Challenges into Opportunities

Summary

Coastal erosion is a known problem in cultural heritage management, particularly in the Mediterranean, which lends itself exceptionally well to studies of maritime trade and connectivity. The loss of coastal land to erosion presents a serious obstacle to our understanding of the archaeological coastscape, due to the unpredictable rate in which it exposes and damages archaeological features. The exposure and subsequent disappearance of material culture is seldom accompanied by systematic archaeological recording. As a result, a wide range of past activities associated with the coast remain unrecorded, their context poorly understood and our understanding of past human interaction at local, regional and inter-regional scales impaired. Coastal erosion is, thus, both a predicament of cultural heritage preservation and an epistemological problem.

Since 2014 the Cyprus Ancient Shoreline Project employed integrated methodologies to record, monitor and contextualise the impact of coastal erosion on the cultural heritage of the south-central coast of the island of Cyprus. In this paper I present some of the results of the lab- and field-based methodologies we implemented to quantify and monitor the loss of information. I also demonstrate how we turned the problem of coastal erosion into new opportunities for understanding the Cypriot coastscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20691