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The Threat Of Climate Change When a wildfire threatened the visitors center at Tonto National Monument in central Arizona last June, artifacts were removed from its museum and temporarily stored at another facility. Archaeologists and firefighters also covered a cliff dwelling with fire-resistant wrapping to protect the 700-year-old wood within the structure.
Myriad archaeological sites are endangered by extreme weather. By Tamara Jager Stewart With sea levels and temperatures rising, permafrost thawing, hurricanes and wildfires raging, archaeological resources are facing grave threats. “There is global scientific agreement that this is a real crisis,” emphasized David Anderson, an archaeologist with the University of Tennessee. “And cultural heritage needs to be part of the climate change discussion. Do we abandon these structures and sites, move them, build sea walls? What gets protected? When tens of millions of people have to move off coast, what happens with their past places?” A paper that was published in American Antiquity in 2019 titled “Preparing for the Future Impacts of Megastorms on Archaeological Sites: An Evaluation of Flooding from Hurricane Harvey, Houston, Texas” warned that “Powerful hurricanes in 2017—Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria—were stark examples of how these previously rare catastrophes are becoming increasingly normal due to climate change,
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with dire consequences for cultural resources.”According to the paper, 920 archaeological sites in southeast Texas were flooded by Harvey’s storm surge and rainfall. In 2017 environmental archaeologist Isabel RiveraCollazo of the University of California, San Diego, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography led a cultural heritage assessment for the Climate Change Council, a panel that advises the Puerto Rican government. That assessment concluded that many sites face inundation by rising sea levels and violent tropical storms. That year Hurricane Maria hit the region with a thirty-foot storm surge, causing flooding, massive erosion, and mudslides. It’s estimated that thousands of historic buildings were destroyed or damaged. The impacts to archaeological resources have yet to be assessed, but reports indicate countless eroded sites and looting of exposed sites.“There is an urgent need to identify innovative ways to mitigate loss,” said Rivera-Collazo.
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