SAVANNAH, Ga. --- Walking along the bluff of an island off Chatham County, archaeologist Chris McCabe keeps his eyes on the ground looking for the stories the artifacts there can tell him.
"Obviously there's quite a bit going on on this site," said Mr. McCabe, the deputy state archaeologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. "There's glass, pottery, shell. It's multiple periods of occupation."
Then something shiny catches his eye. It's just a shard, but it, too, tells a tale.
"This is whiteware from the 1800s," he said. "Look, here's a piece of iron."
The stories of Georgia's past are on the ground now, waiting to be interpreted, but they won't all be there forever. Sea levels are rising, and Georgia's shorelines are constantly shifting.
That's why Mr. McCabe was poking around. He's part of a project that seeks to map eroding shorelines and identify which archaeological sites are most in danger of being lost.
Privately owned and without full-time inhabitants, this island is subject to looting, so Mr. McCabe and fellow researcher Clark Alexander of the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography asked the Savannah Morning News not to identify it.
The shallow water is littered with tree skeletons. The sea has swallowed the earth in which they were once rooted.
As Mr. McCabe checked on the half-dozen known archeological sites on this island, research technician Claudia Venherm walked the island's shoreline with a GPS receiver capable of plotting the terrain to sub-foot accuracy.
She'll compare that to old aerial photos of the same place to get the information she's really after: how fast the shoreline is changing.
The team of researchers has already completed this mapping and documenting process on Georgia's barrier islands, which in some cases were losing up to a foot and a half of shoreline a year. The current work extends to back barrier islands.
On the island the researchers visited last week, the sea is creeping ever closer to a Civil War-era earthen battery and the ruins of a brick bunker that stored ordnance. A graveyard from the 1800s lies in partial ruins just 14 meters or so from the edge of the bluff.
"It was 20 meters in 1979," said Mr. McCabe.
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Sea levels are rising?I wonder, could the melting of the polar caps have ANYTHING to do with that?
Tide and time wait for no man ... The people who build on the shores edge fight the force that no man has mastered. Waterways and the land that overlook them are always in motion ...
Am I missing something? Because every GPS I've had experience with has not been more accurate than within a couple hundred feet. They must have used something a little more advanced than what is available to the general public... or so we shall believe.
leo;my PHONE is accurate to 1 meter.
Well wizzardx1, I stand corrected. My phone is not that accurate. And maybe newer GPS models are more so. However, my point was that, in light of the news about the falsification of some of the climatological data by the green crowd, it makes one wonder how/where readings were taken and how reputable these scientists should be considered now.