Understanding Impacts of Climate Change on Cultural Resources
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| Effects of storm surge on Florida historic cemeteries (Image courtesy of Ed Gonzalez-Tennant) |
Last month several archaeologists, historians,
preservationists, and scientists gathered near the Matanzas Inlet for our inaugural
Sea Level Rise workshop. To say it was the Northeast Regional Center’s initial
foray into SLR is not quite true. We’ve already participated in a Sea Level Rise panel as part of Florida Trust for Historic Preservation's 2013 annual conference and the Society for Historical
Archaeology’s “Have We Missed the Boat” 2015 panel in Seattle. The North Central FPAN Center also recently held
a workshop in Apalachicola for a citizen planning committee to discuss Sea
Level Rise. And the GTM-NERR
has conducted nationally recognized Planning
Matanzas public meetings across the Matanzas Basin. But this workshop was
something different.
Climate Change and Sea Level Rise are for some politically
charged words, but for archaeologists it’s already a reality. We’ve noticed and
have taken part on digs both coastal and inland where we can see environmental
impacts to archaeological sites. And the change is nothing new. Archaeologists
have an unique perspective as we’ve seen Florida change dramatically over the
12-15,000 years of human occupation of the state. Geologists reaching back
millions of years have documented the dynamic ebb and flow of the coastline and
the land’s reaction to extreme environmental changes.
What’s new is we want to provide the public with resources so they can make future informed decisions regarding cultural resources and give them hands-on experience recording threatened sites. There are many choices we will have
to make for ourselves, for our communities, and for our shared heritage and we
want to be ready. We want YOU to be ready. Ready to make informed
decisions about how to spend funds on planning documents, on solutions, on
stop-gap measures, and help identify sites to be identified and studied before
they are inundated or impacted by storm surge.
The workshop began with a welcome by Tina Gordon from the
GTM-NERR welcoming us at the Education Center. It made sense to us to have our
first SLR workshop at Matanazas Inlet in Flagler County, ground zero in some
respects to changes predicted in NOAA SLR and Coastal Flooding modeling tools. We
then presented an overview of the environmental history of Florida to show how
sites have been impacted by environmental change over thousands of years and
different ways past cultures have adapted. We heard from Fernandina Beach
planner Adrienne Burke who is concerned from a preservation perspective what
will happen to her community and wanting to know the full suite of best practices
already installed by other cities, states, and nations. We presented different
options heritage sites can consider and looked closer at how rising sea levels
directly impact archaeological sites and artifacts.
Before breaking for the afternoon fieldtrip Tina Gordon
walked us through the Planning Matanzas
program and led a SLR
adaptation role-playing game developed by the University of Florida during
the public workshop portion of the Planning
Matanzas program to look at cost, affordances, and constraints of many of
the tools available to local commissions and boards. Sea Level Rise adaptation
plans could include actions such as temporary beach renourishment, living
shorelines, hardscaping with seawall construction, elevating structures,
habitat migration corridors, ecosystem conservation, and planned relocation. Workshop
participants are assigned roles ranging from local resident to government
official, ecotourism business owner, inland developer and environmental
scientist, each with a varying degree of funding and SLR adaptation strategy.
Deliberation is the goal of all our education efforts. If
people can discuss, argue, disagree, cite different examples, and make their
case for their strategy, then our job is done. I don’t know how to solve SLR,
and I’m sure each community in the regions I serve will take a slightly
different approach across the adaptation continuum, but it’s important to know
what the options are and be aware of their short and long term effects.
In the afternoon we took the workshop on the road. First
stop, we tried to relocate a sensitive coastal archaeological site.
See it?
Of course you don’t! Most sites are in great need of being recorded
or updated on the Florida Master Site File. This site happened to be under tens
of feet of sand covering it up and is only in view during a low tide after a
storm surge. Being aware of sites to monitor long term impacts is essential.
Relocating to verify the location is just as important. The accuracy of
reporting tools has increased dramatically in the decades since many sites were
initially discovered. In terms of planning, the best plan in the world won’t
help a site or resource if it’s not mapped accurately and verified.
Our second site visit was to Washington Oaks
State Park. We toured the site to see changes since the initial 1980s
reporting by Bruce Piatek. There are standing structures that will be impacted
by SLR, a prehistoric site—noted in the 80s to be in danger due to rising
elevations and wake from boater—that continues to erode out from the side of
the seawall constructed to protect it, and the gardens themselves which will
change as sea level and salinity increase over time.
What’s next? I’ve never faced an archaeological issue that
has generated this much written material over such a short amount of time. There
is a lot of information, best practices, and guidelines being issued every day
that we keep adding to a shared DropBox folder to stay current. It takes a lot
of reading to be aware of all the recently available resources. So first, to
the books! If you’d like to help FPAN with this part of SLR awareness, we need
help with an existing list of SLR related resources to get an annotated
bibliography we can post and update as more resources become available. Contact me if
you are interested in reading articles and writing a short paragraph to help us
navigate through all the literature.
We also hope to offer more SLR workshops across the region
and the state over the next year. FPAN staff from across the state attended
this workshop with hopes of bringing back resources and adapting the agenda for
their region’s needs. If you are interested in a SLR workshop in your area,
check the www.fpan.us website to find your
local FPAN office and contact page with emails to request a workshop. We’re
also looking for sites in the Northeast and East Central regions where we can
conduct the morning information session, free and open to the public. If you
have ideas, let us know by emailing us or leave a comment in the section below.
Text: Sarah Miller, FPAN staff
Images: Sarah Miller, FPAN staff and Storm Surge Cemetery graphic used with permission by Ed Gonzalez-Tennant.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Tina Gordon (GTM-NERR), Adrienne
Burke (City of Fernandina Beach), FPAN staff Kevin Gidusko and Emily Jane
Murray for presenting; Associate Director Della Scott-Ireton, Northwest/North
Central Director Barbara Clark, and Public Archaeology Coordinator Nicole
Grinan for attending; Florida State Parks for allowing our education workshop
to visit Washington Oaks; professional archaeologists and preservationists
across Florida and the US for contributing to our resource folder of articles,
guidelines, and resources for public understanding of climate change and
impacts to cultural resources.