Public Archaeology and Climate Change [Paperback]

Public Archaeology and Climate Change promotes new approaches to studying and managing sites threatened by climate change, specifically actions that engage communities or employ ‘citizen science’ initiatives. Researchers and heritage managers around the world are witnessing severe challenges and developing innovative mechanisms for dealing with them. Increasingly archaeologists are embracing practices learned from the natural heritage sector, which has long worked with the public in practical recording projects. By involving the public in projects and making data accessible, archaeologists are engaging society in the debate on threatened heritage and in wider discussions on climate change. Community involvement also underpins wider climate change adaptation strategies, and citizen science projects can help to influence and inform policy makers. Developing threats to heritage are being experienced around the world, and as this collection of papers will show, new partnerships and collaborations are crossing national boundaries.

With examples from across the globe, this selection of 18 papers detail the scale of the problem through a variety of case studies. Together they demonstrate how heritage professionals, working in diverse environments and with distinctive archaeology, are engaging with the public to raise awareness of this threatened resource. Contributors examine differing responses and proactive methodologies for the protection, preservation and recording of sites at risk from natural forces and demonstrate how new approaches can better engage people with sites that are under increasing threat of destruction, thus contributing to the resilience of our shared heritage.

1. Introduction. Courtney Nimura, Tom Dawson, Elías López-Romero & Marie-Yvane Daire
2. The growing vulnerability of World Heritage to rapid climate change and the challenge of managing for an uncertain future. Adam Markham
3. A central role for communities: limate change and coastal heritage management in Scotland. Tom Dawson
4. Improving management responses to coastal change: utilising sources from archaeology, maps, charts, photographs and art. Garry Momber, Lauren Tidbury, Julie Satchell & Brandon Mason
5. Community recording and monitoring of vulnerable sites in England. Eliott Wragg, Nathalie Cohen, Gustav Milne, Stephanie Ostrich & Courtney Nimura
6. Challenged by an archaeologically educated public in Wales. Claudine Gerrard
7. The men and women behind the MASC Project (Monitoring the Archaeology of Sligo's Coastline): engaging local stakeholder groups to monitor vulnerable coastal archaeology in Ireland. James Bonsall & Sam Moore
8. Recovering information from eroding and destroyed coastal archaeological sites: a crowdsourcing initiative in Northwest Iberia. Elías López-Romero, Xosé Ignacio Vilaseco Vázquez, Patricia Mañana-Borrazás & Alejandro Güimil-Fariña
9. Coastal erosion and public archaeology in Brittany, France: recent experiences from the Alert project. Pau Olmos Benlloch, Elías López-Romero & Marie-Yvane Daire
10. Climate change and the preservation of archaeological sites in Greenland. Jørgen Hollesen, Henning Matthiesen, Christian Koch Madsen, Bo Albrechtsen, Aart Kroon & Bo Elberling
11. Gufuskálar: a medieval commercial fishing station in Western Iceland. Lilja Pálsdóttir & Frank J. Feeley
12. Every place has a climate story: finding and sharing climate change stories with cultural heritage. Marcy Rockman & Jakob Maase
13. Racing against time: preparing for the impacts of climate change on California’s archaeological resources. Michael Newland, Sandra Pentney, Reno Franklin, Nick Tipon, Suntayea Steinruck, Jeannine Pedesen-Guzman & Jere H. Lipps
14. Threatened heritage and community archaeology on Alaska’s North Slope. Anne M. Jensen
15. Cultural heritage under threat: the effects of climate change on the small island of Barbuda, Lesser Antilles. Sophia Perdikaris, Allison Bain, Rebecca Boger, Sandrine Grouard, Anne-Marie Faucher, Vincent Rousseau, Reaksha Persaud, Stéphane Noël & Matthew Brown
16. Archaeological heritage on the Atlantic coast of Uruguay: heritage policies and challenges for its management in coastal protected areas. Camila Gianotti, Andrés Gascue, Laura del Puerto, Hugo Inda & Eugenia Villarmarzo
17. Australian Indigenous rangers managing the impacts of climate change on cultural heritage sites. Bethune Carmichael, Sally Brockwell, Greg Wilson, Ivan Namarnyilk, Sean Nadji, Jacqueline Cahill & Deanne Bird. With contributions by Victor Rostron, Patricia Gibson, Jonathon Nadji, Jeffrey Lee, Fred Hunter, Jimmy Marimowa, Natasha Nadji & Kadeem May

"I found this volume to be very readable, informative and enjoyable. I greatly appreciated the uniqueness of the intersection of public archaeology, cultural-heritage management and climate change. The editors have done an excellent job assembling the papers... I agree with the editors that ‘this volume will make a key reference for those involved in climate change and heritage studies’. I go further in saying that the relevance of this volume to cultural-heritage managers and public archaeologists will only increase in the future."
Andy Viduka
International Journal of Nautical Archaeology (22/02/2019)

"Given that many of these approaches could be tailored to local conditions, this book will be useful to archaeologists, heritage practitioners, or even policy-makers working on the preservation and protection of any heritage site impacted by climate change. While archaeological heritage is an underutilized field in awareness-raising about our changing climate, this edition demonstrates how it can spur engagement in diverse communities and potentially change national and international policy addressing contemporary climate change."

Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology (11/12/2018)

"...an urgent wake-up call about the significant, accelerating, and widespread threats that climate change poses for archaeological sites and other cultural heritage resources on a global scale […] essential reading for all archaeologists."

California Archaeology

"This important volume highlights the threats facing cultural heritage sites and offers strategies for their preservation addressed through public archaeology programs… Recommended."
J. B. Richardson III
Choice (18/07/2018)

"...a very important contribution to our field because it offers practitioners encouragement and inspiration as they race climate change to identify, record, and understand impacts on cultural heritage sites, and then to a respond to those threats and impacts."

Sustainable Museums (30/03/2018)