Old Meets New: Blending IOS Smartphone Technologies with Citizen Science to Record and Monitor Indigenous Site Loss in Coastal Maine

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Methods for Monitoring Heritage at Risk Sites in a Rapidly Changing Environment", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Indigenous shell heaps along the coast of Maine preserve a cultural and environmental record spanning millennia; however, climate change-related sea level rise and increased storm intensity and frequency are destroying sites at an alarming rate. To document and monitor site loss, an interdisciplinary team of students and researchers at the University of Maine designed and developed an IOS Smartphone Augmented Reality (AR) application that measures site erosion quickly, accurately, and consistently. In this paper, we introduce this new technology and discuss its application as part of our Midden Minders program—a citizen science initiative created to record and monitor coastal site loss in Maine.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Methods for Monitoring Heritage at Risk Sites in a Rapidly Changing Environment   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow