Cultural Heritage at Risk in the Twenty-First Century: A Vulnerability Assessment of Coastal Archaeological Sites in the United States

Abstract

Twenty-first-century global warming poses a significant threat to the cultural heritage of coastal regions, but the effects of sea-level rise and changing weather patterns will not be evenly distributed. In addition, continued urban, agricultural, and industrial development concentrated in coastal areas contributes to the destruction of cultural resources. Mitigation of these threats requires rapid action on the part of archaeologists and public land managers. This study presents a method for quickly evaluating relative resource vulnerability at national, regional, and local scales, using data that is available for all United States coastlines, as well as many other coastlines around the world. Three regional case studies-the mountainous coast of California's Santa Barbara Channel, the wetlands and sandy shores of Texas, and the protected estuarine shores of Virginia's Chesapeake Bay-are compared to shoreline vulnerability for the United States as a whole. In each of these regions, sites have already been submerged under rising tides, lost to storm erosion, or destroyed by human activities. Variability in coastal geomorphology, rates of relative sea-level rise, and the structure of prehistoric settlement and subsistence systems, however, produce different patterns of vulnerability.

Twenty-first century approaches to ancient problems: Climate and society

“…5); thousands of sites (from Mesolithic shell middens to Iron Age brochs, Norse settlements, and military structures from two world wars) are at risk in coastal Scotland alone (101). Indeed, computational modeling is now also being applied to study how changing sea levels are affecting archaeological sites and to predict locations of future impact (102,103). Rising sea levels, however, are not the only threat.…”

Maritime Spatial Planning and Maritime Archaeology Conservation: Protecting yesterday’s legacy by planning for tomorrow, cases from Northern Lebanon

“…A global issue, several programs have been designed to mitigate climate change damage to archaeological sites at the national scale (Reeder-Myers, 2015). As far as MSP is concerned, climate change adaptation remains among its top priorities, and several projects introduced it in their planning processes (Santos et al, 2016).…”

“…It has been proven that climate change can lead to the deterioration of many coastal and marine archaeological sites due to sea level rise, erosion, alterations in conservation environment patterns, and even the spread of new animal species and harmful worms (marine borers) (UNESCO, 2017 c). Climate related flooding of buried sites and severe erosion have been documented in three different archaeological sites in the United States (Reeder Myers, 2015).…”

Monitoring and Managing Human Stressors to Coastal Cultural Heritage in Svalbard

“…Climate change impact on cultural heritage constitutes a growing field of scholarly interest, and the potential risks and effects of a warmer and more humid climate on built heritage have been widely recognized (e.g., Fatorić and Seekamp 2017;Hall 2015;Harvey and Perry 2015). Several kinds of geo-threats such as erosion, earthquakes, earth avalanches, and flooding have also been demonstrated to pose threats to cultural heritage sites (Flyen 2009;Reeder-Myers 2015). To what extent and in what ways cultural heritage sites are impacted by environmental stressors depend on the vulnerability of the site and on the extent of stressors.…”