State archaeologist to speak at BIG ARTS Talking Points program
Florida has 8,000 miles of coastline. Within that area are 3,000 archaeological sites and 300 historic cemeteries. According to archaeologist Rachael Kangas, those sites are within risk of the three-foot sea level rise by the year 2100 projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In practice, archaeology is usually about the little things – shards, fragments and pieces. Kangas, for one, gets very animated about the little things. As a public archaeologist for the state of Florida, she spends time in the field and teaching groups, from fourth-graders to retired adults, about how the little things that are unearthed add up to big discoveries and, lately, a warning.
The big discoveries are exciting, like remains of a mammoth found in Cape Coral a few years ago. In North Florida she has seen evidence of a group of people from so long ago – as many as 14,000 years – that there is not even a name for them. Dating back about 2,000 years, the Calusa Indians are modern compared with the ancient Native Americans in North Florida.
“We only have names for the Calusa because the Spanish came here and kept records,” she said.
With a master’s in archaeology from the University of Central Florida, Kangas will talk about local discoveries but also will issue a warning at her BIG ARTS Talking Points program, “Our Heritage At Risk: Rising Sea Levels in Southwest Florida,” set for March 5 at 10 a.m. She hopes her audience will be as aware of the changing sea levels as any number of historic peoples of Florida were.
“We see with Calusa sites like Mound Key that people were dealing with sea level changes,” she said. “People would have lost a football field of beach within a person’s lifetime. But they were a lot more mobile. They could pick up and move.”
Sea levels have gone up and down throughout history, and archaeological records show how people have dealt with that.
“We see them abandoning sites for a little while. And moving back in. Sometimes they’ll change the way they build,” Kangas said.
The immediate future, though, shows only a rise in sea level and people are far less mobile. Kangas stressed that when sea levels rise, so do water levels of “the whole system,” including estuaries and canals. One of the biggest threats to our collective history in light of sea level rise is to cemeteries.
“We like to bury the dead near water. They’re considered nice, peaceful places,” Kangas said.
“We can talk about numbers, but until people understand that we are already having coffins floating down streets, it helps drive it home,” she said, referring to incidents in 2016 when flood waters dislodged caskets in a cemetery in Denham Springs, Louisiana.
“In Captiva there’s a historic cemetery right on the beach, next to Chapel by the Sea. It looks fine now, there’s plenty of beach on the seaward side but we need to be mindful of these and other fragile sites,” Kangas added. “But if a giant hurricane takes out 30 to 100 feet of beach.”