Developing a digital documentation toolkit for the recording of coastal archaeology under threat
Ireland’s and Wales’ coastline and marine environment contain many archaeological and his-torical sites which are at risk of being damaged or destroyed by the present and future effects of climate change. Changes in sea level in combination with projected increase in the severity of coastal storms is expected to intensify coastal erosion and coastal flooding. The EU funded CHERISH Project (Climate, Heritage and Environments of Reefs, Islands and Headlands) of the Irish and Welsh regional seas is researching these threats and brings together a cross-discipli-nary, cross-border team of specialists in the development of a field toolkit which will combine multiple complimentary approaches and methods to evaluate current and future risk. This paper focuses on several CHERISH toolkit remote sensing methods, which are currently being developed and employed within the project in both the terrestrial and marine environments to digitally document a range of archaeological sites and the surrounding historic environment, including: terrestrial and marine laser scanning, aerial and marine SfM, photogrammetric mod-elling of historic aerial imagery and terrestrial and marine geophysics. Critical evaluation of their approach, results and applicability to longer term monitoring will be explored, including: - The ability for field methods to detect coastal change of the historic environment - The de-velopment of proxy methods in the detection of climate change on marine archaeology - The evaluation of cost effective metric recording against costly high-end methods - Identifying the full extent of hidden subsurface archaeology features at coastal monuments and archaeological sites, which are at risk.
Anthony Corns, Robert Shaw, Gary Devlin, Sandra Henry, Edward Pollard, Toby Driver, Louise Barker, Daniel Hunt, James Barry, Kieran Craven, Sarah Davies, Patrick Robson