Should global warming cause sea levels to rise as predicted in coming decades, thousands of archaeological sites in coastal areas around the world will be lost to erosion.
With no hope of saving all of these sites, archaeologists Leslie Reeder (Southern Methodist University,) Torben Rick (Smithsonian Institution,) and Jon Erlandson (University of Oregon) have issued a call to action for scientists to assess the sites most at risk.
Writing in the Journal of Coastal Conservation and using California's Santa Barbara Channel as a case study, the researchers illustrate how quantifiable factors such as historical rates of shoreline change, wave action, coastal slope and shoreline geomorphology can be used to develop a scientifically sound way of measuring the vulnerability of individual archaeological sites.
They then propose developing an index of the sites most at risk so informed decisions can be made about how to preserve or salvage them.
Thousands of archaeological sites — from large villages and workshops to fragmented shell middens and lithic scatters — are perched on the shorelines and sea cliffs of the Santa Barbara Channel, the researchers point out. The archaeological record is never static, and the materials left behind by one generation are altered by the people and environment of the next. However, increasing threats from modern urban development, sea level rise and global warming are poised to increase this steady pattern of alteration and destruction.
The vulnerability of sites in the Santa Barbara Channel is generally lower than sites located along more open, more gently sloped or unstable coastlines, such as the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of North America.
Measuring threats and identifying vulnerable sites is not an end in itself, the researchers say. "We must find ways to act by quantifying those sites most vulnerable to destruction, we take a first step toward mitigating the loss of archaeological data and the shared cultural patrimony they contain."
Thanks to colrum for the link. For more, see http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-archaeological-sites-threatened-seas-urban.html.
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road