Time and Tide Wait for no Man: Responses to Sea Level Rise on Virginia's Eastern Shore

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Middle Atlantic Regional Transect Approach to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

With sea level rise inevitable, archaeologists can no longer cling to the 'Preservation in Place" paradigm as there will no longer be a place. The 'place' of the past will readily become the eroding beach and, eventually, sea bottom. The Threatened Sites Program of DHR anticipated the loss of shoreline sites in the early 2000s and funded survey of the coastlines of both the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Ocean on Virginia's Eastern Shore. With the recent destruction of Hurricane Sandy, funding was made available through NPS grants adding survey work on both the Eastern and Western Shores. On the Eastern Shore, sites were re-surveyed and damage over a 15 year period evaluated. On the Western Shore, a predictive model was developed using a series of environmental attributes, historic cartographic data, and site survey. Significantly, the impacts threaten sites from the earliest episodes of Native American occupation to the more recent eras of the history of the Commonwealth. Accordingly, DHR is bringing together various strategies to better understand the full scope of the threat and to combat data loss. Realizing these are only the beginning of needed mobilization, this paper outlines some of the initiatives that are under way.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Middle Atlantic Regional Transect Approach to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25500