Maritime Site Protection and the Fetch Method: an example from Rogaland, Norway

Abstract

Predictions of future requirements for the protection of maritime archaeological sites are made using the fetch method which has been developed to evaluate the quality of landing-places and navigable channels. The very useful method may explain why archaeological sites along the coast are rare in some areas, but numerous in others. Many of them are vulnerable to destruction by the effects of climate change, especially rising sea-levels, based on the IPCC scenarios. The objective fetch method can be used worldwide to predict where new finds of sites close to sea-level can be expected, and also to predict a site's vulnerability.Key words: fetch method, threatened maritime archaeological sites, landing-place, navigable channels, climate-change scenarios, rising sea-level.Until recently, the Norwegian Cultural Heritage Act has been directed towards archaeological sites on land. There has been little focus on maritime archaeological sites along the coast and in the sea, even though they are protected by the same law as other cultural monuments (Norwegian Cultural Heritage Act sections 4 and 14). The archaeological sites below sealevel are managed by Norwegian universities and maritime museums. The Directorate for Cultural Heritage (Riksantikvaren) has concentrated the protection of coastal culture on buildings and the surrounding cultural landscape (Selsing et al., 2005: 6).Registration of maritime archaeological sites in Norway started much later than the registration of monuments on land 2005a;2005b; Elvestad et al., 2009: 132). No overview of the types, age or the locations of maritime archaeological sites exists. In the national database of cultural monuments (Askeladden) very few maritime monuments are recorded; in 2008 there were no mooring or sailing marks, and only six quays and four landing-places. One reason for this is that marine archaeologists mainly concentrate on underwater projects.Knowledge of the old landing-places, the function they had in the past and their importance is limited, while at the same time these sites are vulnerable (Nymoen and Naevestad, 2006). Maritime archaeological sites are threatened because the beach-zone is being altered by increased boat-traffic which generates rapid waves with high erosive power, by an increasingly condensed urban population, and by building and recreational use of the beachzone. The effects of these will be amplified in the future because of climate change and the rising sea-level.Protection of maritime archaeological sites in areas related to landing-places and the main navigable channels in Rogaland is here elucidated from an interdisciplinary perspective combining marine archaeology, climatology and quaternary geology (Fig. 1). The aim is to create a base for evaluating the consequences of a rising sea-level. Local navigable channels and routes used by local fishing boats are therefore not included either in sheltered waters close to the coast or in open waters out to the fishing banks or deep-sea fishing. Data and analyses related to climate and...

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