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Coastal erosion threatens archaeological sites on every continent. Sixty percent of Africa’s 284 coastal sites of “outstanding universal value” could be at risk from a one-in-100-year extreme coastal event by 2050. And 42 of Europe’s Unesco World Heritage Sites in low-lying coastal regions of the Mediterranean are at risk of erosion. “Current climate change projections, coupled with human impacts, mean that the future is bleak for the ancient remains of many archaeologically rich coastal sites,” Marriner says.
Archaeologists have few tools to prevent the destruction resulting from drought; budgets already strain to protect the most important sites. Building a sea wall that might save coastal sites like the ancient port at Siraf would cost at least $400,000 per kilometer. That’s out of the question, Marriner says.
The most effective protection measures would be those that prevent drought in the first place. This demands first an immediate reduction in the human greenhouse gas emissions that warm the Earth and stimulate desertification. Governments must also develop more sustainable water policies and settle disputes over water with their neighbors to lessen the impact of drought. Iraq’s government, for example, claims that immense damming projects in Turkey and Iran will reduce water flowing down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers by 60 percent in the next 14 years. Jaafar Jotheri, a professor of geoarchaeology at the University of Al-Qadisiyah in Iraq, says this forces farmers to exploit salty underground reservoirs to spray their crops. Wind then blows the salt onto Iraq’s multitude of archaeological sites, some as old as 5,000 years, and permeates their semi-organic mud bricks. The bricks crumble. Jotheri says the salt can invade foundations by capillary action alone.
“We will lose our archaeological sites 100 percent,” he says. “I mean totally lose them because they will be covered by sand. The rest will be destroyed by the wind, temperature, and salt.”
Archaeologists can try to convince governments to consider physical heritage in their environmental policies. People, however, must come first. Drought has already forced Iranians to abandon 1,700 villages in South Khorasan, the region on Sistan’s northern border. Those may soon join the ruins of ancient civilizations beneath the dunes of sand.
For now, researchers can focus only on documenting as many affected sites as possible. Both Rouhani and Fradley work for the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa project at Oxford, which has developed a public database of over 333,000 sites across 20 countries and encourages other archaeologists to contribute their own data. Sand might entomb even the tallest spires and citadels, but thanks to the project’s work, we’ll at least know where to dig.