Saving Seeds But Not Yet Sites
Entryway to the Svalbard Seed Vault in northern Norway (photo by Steffen Trumpf/Picture Alliance, via Getty Images, published at featured link below).
By Marcy Rockman, Lifting Rocks Climate and Heritage Consulting, for the SHA Climate Heritage Initiative
In late October of this year, the Svalbard Seed Vault in northern Norway received its largest deposit to date, approximately 30,000 new samples. The Seed Vault is a gene bank, holding seeds from around the world against a range of catastrophes, including climate disasters and other human-caused events. In this way it’s safeguarding genetic heritage of the world’s plants and millennia of agricultural development. The Seed Vault is the outcome of a powerful vision and wide collaboration. It also raises the question – what visions and plans are underway for cultural heritage of seeds and growth?
There are multiple seed gene banks around the world that store, study, and share seeds. While some withdrawals have been made, the Svalbard Seed Vault has been likened to an external hard drive, the back-up in case regularly used systems of seed stewardship fail. The size of the October deposits is a reflection of the growing recognition of the growing stresses of climate change.
The Arctic is warming, up to four times as fast as other areas of the planet. This warming caused a small flood at the Vault several years ago; this is now fixed, but archaeological sites across the Arctic do not have similar protections. They’re melting along with the permafrost that holds them. There is much to say about impacts of climate on archaeological sites everywhere, and the long-standing crisis at curation facilities struggling to hold what has been excavated previously. But keeping with the theme of seeds, I’ll note that media attention to saving of seeds, which is needed!, most often does not recognize the cultural knowledge that surrounds seeds: tools and care for growing them, recipes that have used them, language and songs that have carried these forward.These too should be part of what we plan for.
For a listing of all blog posts in this series, visit our Climate Heritage Initiative page.
Signing Climate Change and Heritage
A portion of the British Sign Language sign for “carbon footprint,” full video for the sign on YouTube.
By Marcy Rockman, Lifting Rocks Climate and Heritage Consulting, for the SHA Climate Heritage Initiative
An array of new signs has been added to British Sign Language (BSL) to convey climate change and associated issues such as greenhouse gasses, tipping points, and sustainability. Each is a creation that is more than finger spelling or compilations of previously developed signs; rather, this new vocabulary incorporates motions that convey the essence of what is happening or envisioned. This raises some great questions about how to sign connections of archaeology/heritage and climate change.
For example, “carbon footprint” begins with the left hand forming a “C” shape to represent carbon, while the right hand moves away from the “C” to mimic the release of carbon into the atmosphere. This movement of the right hand gives the term flexibility, rapid upward movement of the right hand indicates high emissions from an activity and a slower downward movement means lower emissions (all new terms are illustrated in the featured link).
Inspired by this, I looked up signs for archaeology, history, and heritage. In American Sign Language (ASL), signs for archaeology are combinations of motions for digging, scraping with a trowel, and a motion that suggests time or walking. History is an “H” finger sign moving up and down twice. Heritage is a rolling motion made with both hands moving either away from the body or in towards it.
Over recent years “climate heritage” has come into use to describe connections of archaeology, history, heritage, and climate To date, there isn’t yet a sign for “climate heritage” in ASL or BSL. Which raises the question: what would we like a sign for climate heritage to share? Practical action, such as a digging motion combined with a rising flat palm to convey sea level rise? Or vision, such as an “H” combined with movements around a world then a lowering of emissions?
Featured Link: https://theconversation.com/how-we-developed-sign-language-for-ten-of-the-trickiest-climate-change-terms-242254
For a listing of all blog posts in this series, visit our Climate Heritage Initiative page.
Rewilding and Relearning in Ireland and Elsewhere
Eoghan Daltun on his farm in West Cork, Ireland, which he is rewilding into a temperate rainforest (photo by Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times, published at featured link below).
By Marcy Rockman, Lifting Rocks Climate and Heritage Consulting, for the SHA Climate Heritage Initiative
Efforts are underway to rewild Ireland. While Ireland is known for the abundant and green vegetation its rainfall supports, recent assessments are showing this lushness is not equivalent to biodiversity and ecosystem health. Some rewilding work is now underway to try to address this.
The threads I want to pull from this here are those of shifting baselines and how deep histories of human experience and emotion are interwoven with our understandings and perceptions of how environments can work and what it can mean to live with them. As the featured article notes, English colonization saw forests, bogs, and wild fauna in Ireland as elements to be subjugated – along with its people, a value system and process later followed as well in the Americas. In Ireland, this dispossession is linked to fierce attachment to the land, but the hardships it engendered in turn led to further pushing out of nature in order to survive with farming.
The concept of wilderness has been, since the mid-later 19th century, as eloquently outlined by environmental historian William Cronon, focused on nature as being where humans are not and have not been. Knowledge of Indigenous peoples around the world and the archaeological record across millennia show that there are few places that meet this criteria. Rewilding as developed here reflects this, as do several other recent books (English Pastorale, by James Rebanks in the English Lake District, The Book of Wilding by Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell in Sussex, England). In these, rewilding is not about creating new places where people are not, but relearning ways to live within a range of environments in ways that try to move beyond these histories of dispossession and values that created them.
If you know of books on rewilding work in the US, please let me know.
Featured Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/18/climate/ireland-ecological-desert-rewilding.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Y04.r3oA.bqjGSeiS6Sd1&smid=url-share (gift link)
For a listing of all blog posts in this series, visit our Climate Heritage Initiative page.
Thanks and the Dogs of Tsenocomoco
Nova Virginiae tabvla, drawn by Willem Janszoon Blaeu, cartographer (1571-1638) and Dirck Gryp (Amsterdam: Ex Officina Guiljelmi Blaeuw, ?, 1630). Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2021586022/, November 10, 2024.
By Marcy Rockman, Lifting Rocks Climate and Heritage Consulting, for the SHA Climate Heritage Initiative
One of the superpowers of historical archaeology is its capacity to take stories we think we know well and give us new perspectives on them. One of the dangers of climate change is that it is removing this capacity out from underneath us.
In this week of Thanksgiving in the US, it’s a tradition to look back to experiences of early English colonization in North America. And from grade-school replica Pilgrim hats onward, it’s easy to think we know enough about what happened. But new research on dogs during the early settlement of Jamestown is showing us that there is much more to learn.
This new work looks at the ancient DNA of dog remains recovered from Jamestown, which was within the Indigenous region of Tsenacomoco. Historical sources note that dogs were brought to the Americas over the course of colonial settlement as companions and for help with hunting and other tasks. Indigenous communities of Tsenacomoco also valued dogs for many similar reasons. And this is where it gets interesting, because results of the DNA analysis show that not only were dogs part of the Jamestown settlement from its early days – but at least several of those dogs were Indigenous. Thus what we can now see of relationships between communities of Tsenacomoco and the colonists of Jamestown is that they were more complex and intertwined than they were previously understood to be.
This lens on the past is something to be thankful for, but please know – it is rapidly dimming. As a consequence of rising sea levels, the water table under Jamestown Island is rising and saturating archaeological remains from below. As archaeologists of the Jamestown Rediscovery Project shared with me earlier this year, this rising water is dissolving bone and removing potential for future DNA studies.
For a listing of all blog posts in this series, visit our Climate Heritage Initiative page.
Climate History of Carl Sagan
Photo caption: Carl Sagan speaking at Cornell University, ca. 1987 (photo credit: Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY-SA 4.0 [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0], via Wikimedia Commons, shared at https://theclimatehistorian.substack.com/p/sounding-the-climate-change-alarm).
By Marcy Rockman, Lifting Rocks Climate and Heritage Consulting, for the SHA Climate Heritage Initiative
I’m firmly of the opinion that if it is possible to reference or highlight the work of Carl Sagan, one should do that.
This thoughtful piece by the Climate Historian brings together Sagan’s well known work in the public sharing of science, such as his series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage that aired on PBS in the early 1980s, with his work on climate change. In the 1960s and 70s Sagan had done detailed work on the atmosphere of Venus, which is hotter and denser than that of Earth, and raised strong concerns about what increases in greenhouse gas concentrations around Earth could mean for our planet. In 1985, Sagan gave testimony to the U.S. Senate about the dynamics of the greenhouse effect and anticipated consequences of its corresponding global warming. This was three years before the widely cited testimony of scientist James Hansen.
One of the powers that history and historical archaeology gives us is capacity to explore relationships between actions of individuals and broader patterns over time. From our vantage point now in 2024, we know that fossil fuel preferences of the Reagan administration took priority. But I think it is helpful – and hopeful – that an eloquent scientist spoke of an alternate path those decades ago. Where we are now was not inevitable.
Sagan’s example also helps us to ask: who might speak in such a way for the social sciences and our ability to study being human? Arthur Clarke’s Civilization series and books of Jared Diamond, for example, have tried, but they have not become comparable voices of wisdom. What could an anthropological approach to Cosmos look like if we crafted it now? What could it help us to see and do?
Featured Link: https://theclimatehistorian.substack.com/p/sounding-the-climate-change-alarm
For a listing of all blog posts in this series, visit our Climate Heritage Initiative page.
End of an Era, Power of an Arc
History of coal use in the UK, ca. 1700-2024 (compiled by Carbon Brief and Paul Warde and published at Q&A: How the UK became the first G7 country to phase out coal power).
By Marcy Rockman, Lifting Rocks Climate and Heritage Consulting, for the SHA Climate Heritage Initiative
At the end of September this year, an historic point was reached: England turned off its last coal-fired power plant, ending a 142-year history of coal-fired power in the country.
There are many dynamics at work in this story. In the featured article, focus is on the people who worked at the Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant, which I think is important. What happens in climate change is inextricably linked to human action, so the observances they held, their care for the work they did, and where they may work next matters. To them, of course, but also to all of us, for this sort of event is where trajectories of history and present-day real-time meet.
The Industrial Revolution began in England. There are several possible starting dates, a commonly cited one is the 1709 smelting of iron with coal-based coke by Andrew Darby at Ironbridge Gorge (see Carbon Brief history and illustration above). This led to mass production of iron and, by 1779, construction of the bridge that gave the Gorge its current name. I’m now reading Landscape of Industry: Patterns of Change in the Ironbridge Gorge, by Alfrey and Clark. As this study beautifully lays out, early steps of the Industrial Revolution were interwoven with the geology, topography, and prior patterns of settlement of the Gorge; industry would not have come to be in the same way anywhere else.
The Iron Bridge in Ironbridge Gorge, view looking west along the Severn River (photo by Marcy Rockman, October 2016).
The article notes “(t)he UK was the first country to build a coal-fired power station. It is right that it is the first major economy to exit coal power.” For emissions’ sake, it must not be the last. Our capacity to put these events such as this one in historical context, to see them as part of history in the making, may be part of helping them happen.
Featured Link: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/30/end-of-an-era-as-britains-last-coal-fired-power-plant-shuts-down
For a listing of all blog posts in this series, visit our Climate Heritage Initiative page.
Change for Culture and History, Small and Large
By Marcy Rockman, Lifting Rocks Climate and Heritage Consulting, for the SHA Climate Heritage Initiative
There’s been a change at Lake Park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin: a 114-year old historical marker set on top of the last burial mound in the area has been taken down. This is a good thing.
Several factors led to the removal. One was recognition that the placement of the sign on top of the mound was prompting people to walk up the mound to read it, which is disrespectful. As well, the title of the marker described the mound as “prehistoric.” As the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (NATHPO) said in their sharing of this news on Facebook, “[i]f you ask just about any THPO, they’ll tell you there’s nothing their ancestors did that was ‘pre-historic,’ because their history reaches back millennia and lives on in them and their descendants.”
I’m sharing this here because it strikes me as such an important example of how our understanding of what history is and relationships with it are described and shared can and should change. Removal of an historic marker may sound like an isolated event. But concurrently, as the global climate meeting COP29 is nearing the end of its first week, the nation of Tuvalu is fighting for changes to the law of the sea so that it can retain perpetual connection to its area of the Pacific as seas rise and pioneering approaches to creating a “digital nation.” In both cases, Tuvalu is using new legal and technological tools to carry forward deep cultural connections.
As climate change and efforts to address it bring wide environmental, social, and economic changes, I see actions at both of these scales as critical. Honoring and repairing connections at the local scale indeed is essential to building a future that can broadly integrate care, justice, and connection to places we live.
Featured Link: https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2024/10/16/historical-marker-being-removed-from-milwaukees-last-indigenous-burial-mound/
For a listing of all blog posts in this series, visit our Climate Heritage Initiative page.
Photo credit:
Historical marker being removed from Lake Park in Milwaukee, WI (photo is not credited but, as published at the link above, appears to have been taken by Cari Taylor-Carlson).
COP29 and Building a Vision from Below “Z”
Climate activists marching on the Brooklyn Bridge in NYC during “Climate Week” in September 2024 (photo by Sarah Yenesel/EPA, published at featured link).
By Marcy Rockman, Lifting Rocks Climate and Heritage Consulting, for the SHA Climate Heritage Initiative
This week the 29th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP29) begins in Azerbaijan. The COP29 Parties also are now one year into the first “stocktake” of their progress under the Paris Agreement, and Micro-Climate has reached its 10th week, so I’m going to do a small stocktake of purpose here.
In late September, former US Special Envoy for Climate Change John Kerry gave fossil fuel companies “a letter below Z” for their lack of progress in moving away from fossil fuels (featured link below). The period February 2023-January 2024 was the first to have an average temperature of more than 1.5℃. The outcome of the US election last week is highly likely to remove the US from the Paris Agreement again, slowing US and global progress toward its goals.
Recent reports are raising concerns about the apparent declining capacity of oceans and forests to absorb carbon (pre-print, Guardian-global, Guardian-Finland) and that reducing global temperatures by technical means if they exceed 1.5℃ will be more difficult than expected. In turn, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) reports that world wildlife populations have declined 73% over the past half century.
In the face of all this, where does archaeology fit? WWF I think said it well, that
“(t)o maintain a living planet where people and nature thrive, we need action that meets the scale of the challenge…nothing less than a transformation of our food, energy and finance systems.”
This is the space in which archaeology and heritage should operate: building a vision that history is not about stasis but change, that culture and our senses of ourselves must be part of such transformations. The recent UN Pact for the Future states this should be done; it is up to us to do it.
Featured Link: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/23/new-york-climate-week-al-gore-john-kerry-condemn-fossil-fuels
For a listing of all blog posts in this series, visit our Climate Heritage Initiative page.
Hurricane Impacts on North Carolina’s Coastal Plain Archaeological Sites
By Allyson Ropp, Historic Preservation Archaeological Specialist
As I write this, North Carolina faces a long road of recovery in its western reaches. Hurricane Helene sped through the west, dumping several feet of rain and generating a thousand-year flood event. This was a mere week after the southeastern portion of North Carolina also faced a massive flood event, caused by a random low-pressure system off the coast. These events wrecked immense damage to the people and towns within these regions, and many places are still recovering. These storms also separated people from place, damaging their connection to tangible and intangible resources. The questions now arise about what has happened to archaeological sites and how did these storms impact them.
These storms are not unknown to North Carolina. Since 2015, 28 tropical storms and hurricanes have come through the state, including Hurricanes Florence and Michael in 2018. Like Hurricane Helene, these storms caused immense loss of life and economic impacts. These storms also caused documented damage to cultural resources. These storms precipitated the release of funds from the National Park Service’s Emergency Supplemental Historic Preservation Fund (ESHPF). North Carolina received $9 million in funding to support internal and local community projects concerning historic property reconstruction and stabilization and archaeological site assessment and evaluation to impacts by hurricanes. The NC Office of State Archaeology (OSA) received about $1 million to complete two projects: one focused on the impact on historic cemeteries within coastal counties and one focused on the impacts on archaeological sites within intertidal shorelines.
To begin these projects, it was essential to identify sites across the coastal counties that would be impacted by hurricanes, as represented by storm surge, and additional environmental change, including sea level rise. While the ESHPF projects limited work to FEMA-eligible counties, we expanded this desk-review to encompass all 32 coastal counties. This desk-review calculated the number of sites across these counties, their identified cultural affiliation, site type, elevation, and distance to the nearest waterway. In total, 14,874 sites were identified across these counties, with an even spread between historic, prehistoric, and multicomponent sites (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Breakdown of sites within the Coastal Plain (Photo courtesy of OSA 2024).
These sites were then compared to hurricane storm surge models over all five categories of storms. This showed that over a third of the sites in coastal counties would be impacted by Category 5 hurricane storm surge, and about a quarter for both Category 3 and Category 4 storms. At a county level, impacts varied depending on the proximity to the ocean and riverways (Figure 2). This includes almost complete inundation of Camden, Carteret, Currituck, Dare, Hyde, Pamlico, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Tyrrell, and Washington counties (Figure 3).
Figure 2. The number of sites per county impacted by storm surge from hurricanes. The inner ring represents sites impacted during Category 1 storms and the outer ring represents those impacted by Category 5 storms. The level of impact grows as the size of the storm grows (Photo courtesy of OSA 2024).
Figure 3. Archaeological sites impacted by storm surge of a Category 5 hurricane. Purple dots are those impacted by the storm surge, where the black are the remainder in the area not impacted by storm surge (Photo courtesy of OSA 2024).
Using this information and the ESHPF requirements, OSA set out to conduct ground-truthing to understand the impacts of hurricanes and other environmental changes to archaeological resources and cemeteries. Using a ranking system that accounted for environmental and historical priority, several areas were identified for the survey, including Hammocks Beach State Park in Onslow County, the Scuppernong River Section of Pettigrew State Park, and the Alligator River Game Lands in Tyrrell County (learn more about the process of prioritization and selection).
These areas underwent surveys from September to December 2023 by AECOM. After conducting miles of survey across all areas, AECOM presented the results to OSA. These results indicate difference in location in determining the level of impact from hurricanes and other environmental changes. Hammocks Beach State Park, a barrier island environment, is home to sites dating from the Woodland period through today, including several large indigenous occupation sites and a Civil War fort. Because of the barrier island environment, these sites are exposed to daily sediment movement and wind-driven fetch that dominant site formation process. The Alligator River Game Lands is a large tract of land in northern Tyrrell County along the Albemarle Sound and Alligator River. The identified sites represented colonial and early statehood occupation through maritime industries of the 20th century. Like Hammocks Beach, wind-driven waves drive processes along the Albemarle Sounds. However, sites along the Alligator River side are more protected from such wave action as they are tucked around a corner. Due to the swampy nature of the Scuppernong River, only one site was identified. As the site sits in 10 ft. of water and is tucked around a corner, it is unlikely that daily wave activity impacts the site.
During each category of storm, all three project areas are inundated, particularly along the shorelines where these sites were identified. This inundation from storm surge has immense impact on the stability of the sites. Many of the sites are buried and already eroding. The amount of force behind storm surge waters can further destabilize and erode these sites, causing undercutting and areas of collapse (Figure 4). Storm surge also destabilizes sediments surrounding built components of sites, leading to structural collapse. This effect was documented on several sites in the survey areas. Overall, these projects served two purposes. First, they began the process of conducting macro-scale analysis of hurricanes and sea level rise impacts on sites across the Coastal Plain. Second, they provided the opportunity to ground-truth these impacts to sites and discover new sites along the shorelines before their context is changed by hurricanes and large -scale environmental changes.
Figure 4. Shell midden undercutting and erosion in Hammocks Beach State Park (OSA 2024).
This material was produced with assistance from the Emergency Supplemental Historic Preservation Fund, administered by the National Park Service, Department of the Interior. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of the Interior.