Burning Libraries and Drowning Archives: Shell Middens on the Maine Coast

Summary

Climate change impacts on archaeological sites are equated with the burning of the great library of Alexandria for the scale and rapidity of the loss of cultural and paleoenvironmental data (McGovern, 2016). A portion of that destruction is often in the form of sea-level rise exacerbated coastal erosion. While threatened historic sites, such as lighthouses, generate support for remediation and even relocation, coastal aboriginal sites holding records of thousands of years of coastal occupation and scientific data are damaged and disappear each year. In Maine, over 2,000 shell middens are located on the mainland and island coast. Virtually all are eroding, and some have disappeared in the decades since identification. This presentation is a progress report on our successful efforts to develop a technique to use Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) as a rapid, non-invasive method to delineate the areal and vertical extent of Maine’s eroding coastal shell middens to inform cultural management decisions. Additionally, we report on the early stages of building a citizen science network to undertake rescue excavations and monitor conditions and erosion rates at sites throughout the year.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20912