Maine Midden Minder Network: Collaborating to Save a Cultural Resource

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Geoarchaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Maine’s coastline hosts over 2,000 Native American shell middens. Composed of clam and/or oyster shells, faunal remains, and artifacts, these sites record over four thousand years of cultural and paleoenvironmental information. However, virtually all of these rich archives are eroding in the face of climate change-induced sea level rise and altered weather patterns. The Maine Midden Minder Network is being developed to bring archaeologists, geologists, tribal partners and citizen scientists together to create strategies to assess what remains of these threatened sites, and how to best use limited resources to the recover precious data. Our initial program involves working with conservation organizations to document shell middens on their properties and create volunteer monitoring programs. Additionally, we are creating a website that will allow individual citizen scientists to monitor shell middens near their homes. Information produced by these activities is archived in a dedicated database that is designed to protect site location and land-owner privacy, but allow regional and local analysis of midden destruction.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Geoarchaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26285