04/09/2018  |  1 p.m.

Society of Antiquaries, London

This lunchtime lecture begins at 1pm. Doors open at 12.30 on the day of the lecture.   Our Public Lectures are free and open to the public, but space is limited and reservations are strongly recommended to avoid disappointment. To book online, simply click the 'Reserve Your Seat' button at:

www.sal.org.uk/events/2018/09/coastal-heritage-under-threat-citizan

CITiZAN is concerned with the fate of our coastal archaeological sites. Such features, exposed on the open foreshore, are threatened by destruction from extreme storm events, increased tidal scour, rising sea-levels, related to long-term climate change.  These sites are all too often destroyed unobserved and unrecorded, the neglected victims of coastal erosion, but are so crucial to the understanding of our island history.

Our community-based Coastal and Intertidal Zone Archaeology Network(CITiZAN)  works closely with Historic England, the National Trust and the Crown Estate. We operate with regional teams from offices in York (with the Council of British Archaeology) London (with Museum of London Archaeology) and Portsmouth (with the Nautical Archaeology Society). All the sites our volunteer teams work with have no statutory protection and are all threatened with destruction:  our aim is not to conserve them, but to “preserve them by record” through a programme of initial survey and long-term monitoring.

Building directly on the strengths of previous projects, we are applying to the Heritage Lottery Fund for a grant to support a much expanded three-year programme from the summer of 2018. This will lay firm foundations for a sustainable, community-based, cross-sector solution to the challenge not just of recording archaeological foreshore features exposed by coastal erosion and tidal scour, but also developing high-precision monitoring surveys of the wider problem of coastal change itself.

As part of the innovative approach adopted for CITiZAN’s proposed new project, a series of collaborations is being proposed to provide long-term sustainable support. Central to this is the partnership with local universities in many aspects of the six new regional Discovery Programmes (in Humberside, Liverpool, Essex, Kent, Solent and Devon), supporting public engagement/ outreach activities, including training events, as well as the associated community-led fieldwork and research.

We also hope to provide training to rangers/wardens on coastal sites managed by conservation-minded agencies (eg National Trust, RSPB) using CITiZAN methodology with their own volunteer team. This sustainably embeds community-recording in those institutions, widens the coverage of our survey and broadens the membership of our community surveyors. This initiative will be underpinned by a new national guidance on best practice for the preservation by record of archaeological features threatened by coastal erosion.

Our high media profile (CITiZAN team recently featured in the BBC’s Country File and in Channel 4’s Britain at Low Tide) together with our outreach work will raise the profile and understanding of coastal archaeology set in its wider context of coastal change, relative sea-level change and climate change.