Heritage at Risk along the Delaware Bay’s Scenic Byways: Narrating Climate Threats, Legacy and Loss with StoryMaps

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The archaeological sites, historic locations and districts, and National Register properties along Delaware Bay’s Scenic Heritage Byways hold the stories of centuries of connections between the communities, cultures and resources of the largest preserved coastal marshes along the East Atlantic coast. Probablistic projections of future sea levels based on the IPCC RCP scenarios indicate that dozens of these cultural resources will be submerged within the decade and hundreds more by the year 2100. This involves losses to natural resources, local and regional cultural heritage, tourism, and broader impacts to communities, infrastructure and the built environment. We illustrate the outcomes of applying probabilistic future sea level projections to known cultural resources along the Bayshore Byways. We describe our use of digital narration through StoryMaps to demonstrate impacts to iconic places and to portray the scope of the problem in a broadly accessible and engaging manner.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SHA 2022 General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology