Climate change's effects are most often discussed in the present or future tense, as in how many inches the seas have risen or how hot temperatures will get.
Rarely is the discussion about how the rapid changes to the environment will affect the past, as in those who have lived and died and what they left behind.
“And that cultural heritage is potentially under threat as a consequence of climate change, particularly here with respect to sea level rise and storminess,” said Michael Savarese, a Florida Gulf Coast University geology professor in Fort Myers. “You can't move a Native American midden, pack it up, and move it somewhere else, but you could, in effect, invest resources into studying the archeology of that site before it's destroyed."
Given South Florida's rich history, which includes Native American civilizations and Spanish explorers, important artifacts range from tools to remnants of villages to garbage piles, all on dots of high ground throughout the Everglades.
Savarese said there needs to be an added urgency to protect historical artifacts due to Southwest Florida's vulnerability to rising sea levels and stronger hurricanes. If they're lost, future generations won't have these tangible pieces of history to learn from.
Saving them, whether that means physically removing the artifacts before they disappear or by recording on paper and in photos what the locations looked like, is about respecting the past and ensuring that the stories of those who came before us aren't forgotten.
Modern buildings will be at risk, but so will more than 16,000 archaeological sites that will go underwater. A balance must be found between saving the past and preparing for the future, Savarese and his co-authors wrote in a study on climate change’s threat to ancient sites in the journal Historical Archaeology.
Historical sites overlooked
The researchers found that local governments in South Florida are quite focused on climate change when making future land-use plans. But too often, they say, that creates a type of tunnel vision where planners are blind to how their ideas will impact important historical sites.
Most marine scientists believe human-caused climate change will alter South Florida's coastline due to sea-level rise alone.
Savarese and his co-authors predict that, in about 15 years, the warming planet will cause sea levels to rise between 10 to 17 inches. By 2070, seas could come up between 21-54 inches. If the sea rises that much Florida will lose 10% of its land mass within 100 years.
That means more flooding, people moving away from the coasts, and now-potable water will be undrinkable. Stronger hurricanes and hotter temperatures will make it even harder for people to work outside. How and where crops will grow will change.
How to address those issues will be different in Collier County than in Miami-Dade County. Palm Beach County has a third way of doing it.
While all historical sites are important, some are more significant than others. So when it comes to building things like seawalls to protect against rising seas, hard choices have to be made about what gets saved, and in what format.
“We need to document and prioritize these sites to save their information,” the authors wrote. “Even if we can't save the sites themselves.”
The article looks at how these decisions are made, who's involved, and how the decision-making may be useful for both scientists studying the past and for future building projects.
Everglades rich in human history
Some of those projects will be in the Florida Everglades, where NOAA’s Office of Coastal Management estimates that about four feet of sea level rise will inundate large swaths of the park, which will be underwater during the highest tides by the year 2100.
Sea level rise also will swamp the Ten Thousand Islands Archeological District and the Flamingo District, which is at the lowest tip of mainland Florida. All but the highest cultural sites would be inundated.
For now, there are plenty of sites still intact from a time perhaps 1,500 years ago when Native Americans adapted to the freshwater marsh of the southern Everglades leaving behind trash mounds and shell middens.
“They used hardwood hammocks that rose like islands in the water as a home base for daily activities. As park archeologists excavated sites on the hammocks, it became apparent that Indigenous people had gathered, cleaned, and processed food there, and, more recently, gardened,” wrote April Watson in Park Science magazine last year.
“Indigenous people also constructed a canal — the Mud Lake Canal — that connected the inland Everglades to the ocean. This allowed them to move from the Bear Lake region of the Everglades to Whitewater Bay while avoiding the treacherous waters in Cape Sable.”
The Shark River Slough Archeological District today is mostly a flooded freshwater marsh, with very little inhabitable dry ground, Watson wrote.
“The slough is one of two main routes of water moving through the Everglades. The archeological sites found in the Shark River Slough are black earth middens — accumulations of sediment, peat and muck, shell and bone, and cooking fat and debris. They are akin to refuse piles today. Indigenous people may have used the Shark River Slough to form smaller family camps or to procure resources.”
"This archeological district is a maze of tiny islands, mangroves, and slow-moving water, with extensive shell middens and shell works from about 1,000 to 1,500 years ago. They have some of the largest and most complex shell constructions in the world."- April Watson in Park Science magazine
The park also has structures that date from the 1930s to the 1970s, the earliest being the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps. The remains of corps camps in Royal Palm and Flamingo still exist. The camp buildings in Flamingo were constructed of limestone blocks, which were durable enough to survive even when other parts of the buildings did not make it through a hurricane or flood.
Headway is being made
Savarese’s co-researchers on the journal article published last week, “Act Local: Climate-Change Policy at the County Level in South Florida,” include S. Ayers-Rigsby of Florida Atlantic University, R. Kangas of the University of South Florida, and J. Ransom from Miami-Dade County.
“Archaeologists for years have known climate change will have an increasingly devastating impact on archaeological sites,” the journal authors wrote. “The tedious work of promoting the inclusion of cultural sites in climate-change planning processes continues, and cultural resources are still left out of planning documents.
“However, as archaeologists continue to do this work, more headway is being made.”
Environmental reporting for WGCU is funded in part by VoLo Foundation, a non-profit with a mission to accelerate change and global impact by supporting science-based climate solutions, enhancing education, and improving health.
Sign up for WGCU's monthly environmental newsletter, the Green Flash, today.
WGCU is your trusted source for news and information in Southwest Florida. We are a nonprofit public service, and your support is more critical than ever. Keep public media strong and donate now. Thank you.
