The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has documented wide-ranging changes to the world's coasts and oceans, with significant further change predicted. Impacts on coastal and underwater heritage sites, however, remain relatively poorly understood. The authors draw on 30 years of research into coastal and underwater archaeological sites to highlight some of the interrelated processes of deterioration and damage. Emphasising the need for closer collaboration between, on one hand, archaeologists and cultural resource managers and, on the other, climate and marine scientists, this article also discusses research from other disciplines that informs understanding of the complexity of the interaction of natural and anthropogenic processes and their impacts on cultural heritage.
Over the last 40 years, there has been a discernible increase in the number of scholars who have focused their research on early industrial organizations, a field of study that has come to be known as Archaeotechnology. Archaeologists have conducted fieldwork geared to the study of ancient technologies in a cultural context and have drawn on the laboratory analyses developed by materials scientists as one portion of their interpretive program. Papers for this department are solicited and/or reviewed by Michael Notis, a professor and director of the Archaeometallurgy Laboratory (www.Lehigh.edu/~inarcmet) at Lehigh University. The assessment of corrosion on the USS Arizona included the pioneering development of a minimum-impact costeffective technique to determine the corrosion rate of steel-hulled shipwrecks in seawater. The technique, with potential application worldwide, is illustrated in this paper with the application to a World War II Japanese midget submarine submerged in deep waters off the Oahu, Hawaii, coast.
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