Small bites

• We recognize the International Day for Monuments and Sites by highlighting coastal heritage/archaeological sites.
• In line with the theme for 2022, ‘Heritage and Climate’, we bring awareness about rising sea levels using drowned landscapes on South Africa’s southern Cape coast.
• There are lessons we can learn about climate change from the archaeological records of coastal sites.

Some lessons about changing sea levels, right on our coasts

As we look back at the week in which we celebrated the International Day for Monuments and Sites (April 18), we highlight heritage sites that are located on our coasts today. The theme set by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) for the year 2022 is “Heritage and Climate,” and heritage in South Africa can teach us about climate change.

Archaeological sites that are located along South Africa’s present coast give us more to think about than just the incredible stories of transformation in our way of life since the Stone Age period. They serve to remind us how climate is constantly reshaping our world, by remapping coastlines. In southern Africa, like elsewhere in the world, changes in coastlines give us many life opportunities and also take them away. We know this, for example, from palaeoenvironmental and archaeological records, which hint to us that for most of human history, our ancestors lived and thrived on landscapes that are submerged under the sea today. The Palaeo Agulhas Plain (PAP) is an example of such a landscape that played a crucial role in the evolutionary success of our species and many other species. Yet, we will never enjoy it today like our ancestors did at Pinnacle Point, Klasies River, Nelson Bay, Blombos caves and many other sites on the southern Cape coast.

We are currently experiencing extreme weather episodes, which are increasingly accepted as an indication of changes in the general global climate. As a result, it has been noted that rising sea levels may soon threaten many archaeological sites that are sitting along the African coast today. This means that we run the risk of losing land and much history to the sea, in the same way that we lost ecological niches many times in prehistory when the earth went naturally from cold climates, called glacial periods, to significantly warm climate phases, called interglacial periods.

Although the present climate change is due to anthropogenic activity, we can still draw lessons from past natural climate change cycles. These cycles can help us understand the vulnerability of our resources and civilization to significant changes in weather systems, a lesson worth learning for sustainable development.

On behalf of GENUS, Happy International Day for Monuments and Sites!