Coastal Archaeology and Climate Change in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract

Recent global projections of climate change highlight alarming rates of flooding and erosion on the coastlines of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Though there are indisputable links between climate change and the deterioration of maritime cultural heritage (particularly coastal archaeology), deterioration is often the result of multiple compounding factors, central among which are anthropogenic landscape alterations. In this paper we attempt to disentangle these factors at a small scale, using the Gaza Strip, Libya and Oman as case studies. We examine the impact of accelerating coastal erosion, flooding, and increasing frequency of tropical cyclones to question predominant discussions on the impact of climate change on heritage. We instead emphasize methods and practices for the identification of sites that can expand and refine climate change research (often reliant on data from the twentieth and twenty first centuries) through the long-term perspective archaeology is uniquely placed to offer.