Climate Change, Sea-Level Rise, and the Vulnerable Cultural Heritage of Coastal New Hampshire

In this brief, author Meghan Howey examines the impact of climate change and sea-level rise on the vulnerable cultural heritage of coastal New Hampshire. Coastal New Hampshire has been identified by scientists and recognized by policy makers as an area experiencing many of the effects of climate change, including increasing temperatures and rising sea levels. The continued trajectory of such change places the seacoast region at a very high risk of coastal flooding today and of coastal land submersions within the next 50 to 100 years. Coastal New Hampshire stands to lose 14 percent of its known prehistoric and historic cultural heritage sites, including twelve sites on the National Register of Historic Places, to sea-level rise. These losses would negatively impact the region’s robust tourist economy. More than 80 known historic cemeteries are at risk of damage or complete destruction by sea-level rise. The potential damage to unknown, yet-to-be discovered burial grounds is also of concern. Communities across the region face difficult questions about what they are willing to lose and what efforts they are able and willing to make to protect vulnerable cultural heritage sites and graveyards from sea-level rise. Given the significance of these cultural heritage sites in coastal New Hampshire and the disproportionate contributions they make to the state’s revenue, these questions must addressed head-on, and continued analyses, discussions, and policy development will be important for addressing the vulnerability of the region’s cultural heritage

Meghan Howey, Assistant Professor Department of Anthropology, travels to Uganda

Professor Howey travelled to Uganda in summer 2012 to conduct archaeological and paleoecological research in the Ndali crater lakes and swamps.In June 2012, with support from the Center for International Education, I furthered my involvement in a research program focused on the deep history of human-environment interaction in the Ndali crater lake landscape of western Uganda. The Ndali crater lake landscape is a beautiful and complex series of crater lakes and in-filled crater swamps east of the Rwenzori Mountains which forms a particularly distinct setting in the Albertine Rift. Exponential population growth and unchecked land conversion have made the Albertine Rift one of the world’s most threatened biodiversity hotspots. Our research aims use deep history to inform present and future trajectories of landscape change in the Albertine Rift. To build towards that goal, we need to first test whether linkages can be established between local archaeological and paleoecological records

Sustaining Cultural Heritage at UNH

Building a new road? A cell phone tower? A pipeline? A new government building? Building anything with federal funds or on federal property requires that one must conduct a review of the impact of the project on tangible cultural resources, which includes archaeological sites and historic buildings, under section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 (NHPA). But building a new student center, a new dorm, or a new business school on your land-grant university campus? More often than not, no cultural resource review is required.i What responsibility do land-grant universities have to the tangible cultural heritage on their land when section 106 is not mandated? As a land-grant institution and one that takes sustainability seriously, what should UNH’s role be in managing its cultural heritage

Geospatial modeling approach to monument construction using Michigan from A.D. 1000–1600 as a case study

Building monuments was one way that past societies reconfigured their landscapes in response to shifting social and ecological factors. Understanding the connections between those factors and monument construction is critical, especially when multiple types of monuments were constructed across the same landscape. Geospatial technologies enable past cultural activities and environmental variables to be examined together at large scales. Many geospatial modeling approaches, however, are not designed for presence-only (occurrence) data, which can be limiting given that many archaeological site records are presence only. We use maximum entropy modeling (MaxEnt), which works with presence-only data, to predict the distribution of monuments across large landscapes, and we analyze MaxEnt output to quantify the contributions of spatioenvironmental variables to predicted distributions. We apply our approach to co-occurring Late Precontact (ca. A.D. 1000–1600) monuments in Michigan: (i) mounds and (ii) earthwork enclosures. Many of these features have been destroyed by modern development, and therefore, we conducted archival research to develop our monument occurrence database. We modeled each monument type separately using the same input variables. Analyzing variable contribution to MaxEnt output, we show that mound and enclosure landscape suitability was driven by contrasting variables. Proximity to inland lakes was key to mound placement, and proximity to rivers was key to sacred enclosures. This juxtaposition suggests that mounds met local needs for resource procurement success, whereas enclosures filled broader regional needs for intergroup exchange and shared ritual. Our study shows how MaxEnt can be used to develop sophisticated models of past cultural processes, including monument building, with imperfect, limited, presence-only data