Burning Libraries: A Community Response

ABSTRACT

The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a growing recognition that widespread impacts of climate change (erosion, sea level rise, wildfires, warming soil temperatures) are rapidly destroying archaeological sites and permanently wiping out millennia of cultural heritage and important scientific data on a global scale. This paper provides a brief overview of the efforts of the international archaeological community and its allies to organise a broad and coordinated response to this widespread and urgent threat to our basic record by mobilising at the local, national and international level. The work of the archaeological professional societies has supplemented a growing host of initiatives on multiple scales by national and local governmental agencies, regional research teams, local and Indigenous heritage groups and the international global change scientific community. This paper provides some reflections on the Society for American Archaeology’s Climate Change Strategies and the Archaeological Record team effort from 2015 to 2018, some links to more contacts and resources and some suggestions for future directions.

KEYWORDS:

• Archaeology
• global change threats
• erosion
• climate change

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas H. McGovern

Thomas H. McGovern is Professor and Director of the Zooarchaeology Laboratory, Anthropology Department, Hunter College. He is Coordinator of the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) and Associate Director of the CUNY Human Ecodynamics Research Center (HERC).