Shetland Islands Climate and Settlement Project: Historical Ecological Archaeology of Fragile Coastal Environments
Principal Investigator: Gerry Bigelow, College of Arts & Sciences
Funder: National Science Foundation
Project Period: 1/15/05 through 12/31/05
This grant supports the exploratory phase of an international, interdisciplinary research project which will investigate the interaction of climatic and cultural changes in coastal sand environments of the Shetland Islands, the northernmost region of Scotland. Sandy beaches and the dunes that back them are important locations for studying maritime adaptations in many areas of the North Atlantic because zooarchaeological and spatial archaeological evidence is often well-preserved in their deposits. Coastal sands are also vulnerable to periodic, catastrophic destabilization, resulting in the mass aeolian transport of sand onto human settlements.
The Shetland Islands Climate and Settlement Project will attempt to: reconstruct the sequence of aeolian sand deposition at several coastal locations that were settlement foci over the past 2500 years; investigate possible associations between phases of sand blows, the occurrence of extreme weather events or phases of storminess, and particular types of climate change; and define contemporary cultural changes that may have been adaptive responses to transformations in local ecology related to global change. The exploratory phase of the project proposed here will include test excavations of an archaeological site; collection of sediment samples for dating through optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) analyses; geological surveying of the site environment, including evaluation of a lake for sediment coring; and surveying of the Shetland Archives for historical documentation of past, extreme weather and changes in the landscape and human culture during the historic period.
At present, although we think the study area has high potential to support such a fine-grained analysis, this type of investigation has not been attempted in the North Atlantic region before, and many geological and archaeological forces may have altered the site and its environment sufficiently to disqualify them as targets of research. This summer’s activities should collect the background information required for submitting a large-scale proposal with full investigation of the site and its contents as the centerpiece, or rule it out. Participating personnel will include students and faculty researchers from the US, UK and Australia. Almost all of the participants are experienced in Shetland archaeology, and the senior personnel are all involved in research on human-environment interactions related to climate change.