Shetland Islands Climate and Settlement Project: Multidisciplinary Analysis of Environmental Catastrophes on Northern Coastlines

This award will support the main phase of the Shetland Islands Climate and Settlement Project, a multidisciplinary and international research effort to explore relationships among climate trends, severe and abrupt transformations of northern, coastal environments, and the ways in which human populations have adapted to these environmental crises and sometimes contributed to them. The main phase of the project will include a three year program of field, laboratory and archival research that will examine the causes, processes and human dimensions of episodic, catastrophic destabilizations of sand environments on northern coasts. The project is also intended to be a case study in the archaeology of disasters, and its findings will contribute to middle range theory on the geoarchaeological signatures of extreme, short-term environmental stresses, and the anthropology of human response to sudden crisis. A key goal of the project is to assess the roles played by massive storm events, or clusters of storms, in mobilizing coastal sands in the Shetland Islands, UK, during periods of climatic variability, and to trace human responses to the succeeding environmental catastrophes. Shetland has been chosen as a geographical focus because it is a region sensitive to storm variability linked with major climate phenomena such as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), which in turn play dynamic roles in extended sequences of global change. In addition, Shetland has multiple coastal sand environments where landscape and settlement histories may be researched through analyzing rich archaeological, documentary and paleoenvironmental data, and through incorporating traditional ecological knowledge from local residents. In the project's central case study a team of researchers in archaeology, history, geoscience, biology and spatial analysis, drawn from four US and four UK colleges and universities, will collaborate in investigating a medieval township that was buried in eolian sand at Quendale, Dunrossness, in the later 17th century CE, a time of extreme Little Ice Age climate shifts. This ecological and economic disaster will be studied through bioarchaeological and material culture analyses, complemented by an archival records survey of contemporary documents relating to issues of climate, resources and settlement. Ground penetrating radar surveys of the project area, in conjunction with studies of terrestrial and lake sediments, and soils analyses, will facilitate reconstruction of the history of sand movements, land use, and settlement changes. A biological study of oxygen isotope ratios in marine mollusc archaeofaunas will provide an independent proxy measure of local sea temperatures from medieval to pre-modern times, yielding data that will be integrated with larger-scale climate and environmental datasets to assess local expressions of global and hemispheric trends. Advanced GPS, GIS and other digital recording systems will facilitate the collection, organization, analysis and archiving of diverse environmental, archaeological and historical data The project crosses many disciplinary and national boundaries in studying human-environment interactions in a type of catastrophe scenario that apparently evolved on the sub-annual to decadal time scales that may characterize many future environmental challenges that will be faced by northern coast- dwellers as global warming proceeds. Project personnel combine researchers with extensive multi-region experience in northern environments with researchers and educators who are new to boreal research. The broad integration of disciplines and multiregional experience brought by the team will also enrich: a) training and educational experiences for participating undergraduate and graduate students; b) outreach activities with pupils and teachers at two primary schools; and c) collaborative projects with community residents who will be involved in archaeological and oral history research, and who will access project findings in local publications and presentations.