When It Rains Now, It Is a Disaster: Heritage Landscapes during Climate Change

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological landscapes are not heritage landscapes similar to the picturesque; they are the living heritage of the contemporary inhabitants and stakeholders who live with the past, ecological destruction, and climate change. Our paper is informed by the Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project (2010–2021) in western central Turkey. At its inception, the project was designed to research the landscape of a thirteenth-century BCE monumental pool at the site of Yalburt Yaylası. In the winter of 2022, disastrous rain washed the asphalt of the rural road bisecting the site and deposited eroded bedrock and asphalt in the pool. Two months earlier, the preservation council had approved a project to install security cameras and fence the pool, as if the monument could be set aside from its landscape during climate change. Whereas research on ancient landscapes—particularly their geomorphology and phenomenology—is central to archaeological fieldwork, in the face of today’s ecological and heritage destruction, setting aside the ancient from contemporary political ecology repeats the mistakes of the imperial vision that set aside picturesque from industrial landscapes. Our paper focuses on our advocacy during our 2022 study season for a preservation project that allows for precipitation that now “rains a disaster (afet).”

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36731.0