Exploring the Effects of Climate Change and Coastal Erosion on Jug Bay’s Cultural Heritage

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By Jug Bay Intern Haley Borowy. This blog post was originally published in Marsh Notes, the newsletter of Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary, and is cross-posted here.

My summer internship project was an archaeological investigation of Emory Waters Nature Preserve. Located in the southern portion of Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary’s east coast, Emory Waters has had little archaeology done. It contains three archaeological sites, two of which we only know of due to a 2019 pedestrian survey, where people look for artifacts on the surface of the ground and do not dig. Like several places in Jug Bay, Emory Waters suffers from severe coastal erosion, with its lower locations at risk of sea level rise. I want to study how climate change and its effects, like worsening erosion and sea level rise, affect archaeology sites, so this area was perfect.

From left: Volunteers Ishy Gonzalez-Prieto, Saffron Hayes, Haley Borowy, and county archaeologist Drew Webster at a shovel test pit.

In July, myself, Anne Arundel County archaeologists, county interns, and many volunteers set out to dig 82 shovel test pits (STPs). This type of work entails digging holes every 50 feet that are about two-and-a-half to three feet deep. They were dug to hug the coastline to determine what kind of cultural resources are vulnerable to environmental change. Some additional STPs were dug 25 feet from the originals to better understand the boundaries of several concentrations of artifacts.

Over 1,500 artifacts were recovered, the vast majority of which were from before the colonial period and Native American in origin. All of these were cleaned and bagged in the county archaeology lab by me, other interns, and volunteers. Some other interesting finds included a plethora of decorated pottery shards, stone tools including projectile points, wrought nails, and fragments of a tobacco pipe.

A quartz Piscataway projectile point. Photo courtesy of Haley Borowy.

This part of the coastline has a very heavy concentration of cultural material. Out of the 82 STPs we dug, only 10 were negative. With STP surveys, usually those numbers are the other way around. This speaks to the need to protect Emory Waters from further coastal erosion and to explore it more in depth archaeologically.

Welcome Summer Interns!

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TWO graduate students, FIVE undergrads, ONE high schooler, and ONE recent grad walk into an archaeology lab…

Wait–it’s not a joke:

This is our amazing crew of 2022 interns and they are keeping the Lost Towns Project and Anne Arundel County’s Preservation Stewardship Program BUSY this summer!

Interns Kaitlin Sennewald and Julia Ribblett learn the basics of archaeology field techniques at the River Farm Site in Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary

Our Interns hail from educational institutions across Maryland, as well as the Midwest, New England, and the UK, and are focusing on a variety of archaeology, preservation and heritage research. Projects range from learning the basics of field and lab methods, documenting historic cemeteries, and studying the impacts of climate change on historic sites, to a study of the the archaeology of black spaces on plantation landscapes, zooarchaeology (the study of animal bones), and analyzing artifacts from the Ogle Research Collection to explore interactions between Native American groups in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic over 2,000 years ago. Stay tuned for their blog posts as they highlight their research projects.

Special thanks to funding from Maryland Humanities and their SHARP Recovery Grants Fund1, matched by generous donations by our supporters. This funding has allowed the Lost Towns Project offer two interns financial stipends for the first time ever. Offering financial support has raised the quality and commitment of our intern pool, and undoubtedly helped with gas expenses!

We would love to offer funding for three interns next summer. If you are able to help us support the rising stars in the fields of archaeology and historic preservation, please consider making an internship donation to the Lost Towns Project today. (LTP is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit–so it’s tax deductible!) History will thank you!

1Funding for these grants has been provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and Maryland Humanities as part of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) and the NEH Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan (SHARP) initiative.

County Archaeologists Present at the Middle Atlantic Archaeology Conference

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This past weekend, March 24-27, Anne Arundel County Archaeological Sites Planner Stacy Poulos and consultant Drew Webster participated in the Middle Atlantic Archaeology Conference in Ocean City, MD.

Stacy Poulos
Drew Webster

Stacy was featured as a panelist on “The Sea is Rising and the Mountains are Sliding: A Discussion of Climate Change, Middle Atlantic Cultural Heritage, and Actions We Must Take.” The panel discussion brought together our colleagues who are engaged in site discovery, documentation, and mitigation with those who are creating programs to prioritize and preserve cultural heritage.

Drew presented a poster entitled, “55,555 Artifacts from the Swann Site, Calvert County, Maryland.” The poster summarizes the findings from the Swann Site, the largest site assemblage in the Ogle Collection. You can view the poster here.