Surveying Scotland’s coast: how the integration of scientific models and community heritage knowledge is helping coastal communities address the realities of climate change.

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Bridging Science and Service: How Archaeologists Address Climate Change" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Scotland benefits from having a mature methodology for the national assessment of threats to coastal heritage. Coastal surveys now incorporate community participation and a process of ongoing prioritisation. The approach has been highly effective in engaging the public in thoughtful dialogue and practical action relating to the effects of climate change upon heritage. For the past 25 years, much of this work has been conducted by the SCAPE Trust, a research team at the University of St Andrews. Our work is enabled by the support of Historic Environment Scotland, together with a legislative tradition of open access to heritage records and a right to roam. This paper presents a further evolution of SCAPE’s approach, which now deploys recently available models of coastline vulnerability and future change to focus fieldwork in areas most threatened by erosion and puts community knowledge to the fore. Using examples from recent fieldwork in the Northern and Western Isles we will demonstrate how the combination of scientific information and local heritage knowledge is informing how climate change is being conceptualised and experienced by coastal communities. We consider how this could enrich action in addressing the realities of climate change upon the coastal heritage resource.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Bridging Science and Service: How Archaeologists Address Climate Change   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53756