“What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” Dr. Jane Goodall, Scientist & Activist
Coastal researchers are documenting increasingly severe rates of sea level rise, nuisance flooding, coastal erosion, and beach migration. These climate-driven processes are actively impacting, even erasing, the archaeological and historical records along coastlines around the world. Yet, the vastness of our coastlines negates the ability of professional archaeologists and heritage managers to be the sole active monitors of site destruction. A different, more collaborative and scalable approach is needed to document and salvage, where possible, at-risk, threatened, and damaged cultural resources.
Recognizing the challenge, the North American Heritage at Risk (NAHAR) working group was formed during the fall of 2020, in the midst of another global crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic. We are motivated to develop and deploy a unified and scalable response to the impacts of climate change on our cultural heritage. Our approach is rooted a praxis that prioritizes community-based collaboration and resource sharing informed by scientific modeling and analysis. Each member brings to NAHAR a mosaic of success in the areas of outreach, modeling, and mitigation. Click here to learn more about NAHAR and our research pipeline.
As an all-woman team, we hope to make the most efficient use of every heritage at risk tool available in the Southeast to address the enormous issue of impacts to cultural resources from climate change at the very time action is most critical. You can read more about the working group here, sign up to get involved here, or check out our upcoming events here.
Modeling heritage at risk is the first stage in the NAHAR research pipeline.