Georgia Marina Andreou

Decades of conflict in the Gaza Strip have contributed to widely documented cultural heritage destruction, demonstrating a need to monitor vulnerable sites and enhance the empirical base. This article describes how the Gaza Maritime Archaeology Project (GAZAMAP 2022–2023) was developed to monitor coastal and near-coastal sites, collaboratively. Owing to the unprecedented destruction of heritage since October 2023, GAZAMAP's scope has fundamentally shifted.

Tropical cyclones are among the most detrimental hazards to the environment, societies, and economies, each year affecting millions of people and resulting in substantial casualties and material destructions in coastal communities. In this context, maritime cultural heritage, encompassing material evidence for the engagement of people with the sea, both on land and under water, is particularly vulnerable. Despite the significant number of archaeological sites exposed to tropical cyclones and other extreme sea-level events, maritime cultural heritage in the MENA region is rarely included in coastal vulnerability indices or incorporated in mitigation strategies, disaster management, sustainability, and resilience policies. In this study we examine the impact of tropical cyclones on the maritime archaeology of Oman with emphasis on the Dhofar region. This paper builds on existing coastal research in the Dhofar region—an area identified as the most cyclone-prone administrative region in Oman, but also an area that contains substantial archaeological remains. Central among Dhofar’s maritime cultural heritage is Al-Baleed, a Medieval seaport with unparalleled evidence of engagement with international trade networks.

For millennia, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has been a culturally dynamic zone, bounded by maritime societies dependent on the sea for communication, trade and livelihoods. The archaeological evidence of these past societies represents an extraordinary physical legacy of human endeavour and presence across this region, contributing to senses of place, identity and belonging amongst contemporary coastal communities. However, the coastal landscapes and marine environment of the MENA region are undergoing a period of profound change, associated with large-scale human development and climate change. In order to assess this change and the level of impact on the resource, the Maritime Endangered Archaeology project (MarEA) was established in 2019 to document cultural heritage sites and landscapes across the coastal and near-shore zones of the survey region. This paper introduces the work of the project and outlines a series of case studies presented in this volume that are representative of the variety and depth of work being undertaken within the project.

As a result of its geographic location, cultural diversity and historical trajectory, the Gaza strip is a key zone of scholarly enquiry and has a central role in the historical, social, political, economic, legislative and environmental discourses for the wider region. Existing historical knowledge of Gaza is dominated by combative narrative trends that emphasise the events of the 20th and 21st centuries and invoke archaeology extensively. In this context, cycles of material preservation and damage—often accompanying other forms of violence—have attracted the attention of academics and international media. Among the corollaries of this situation, is the destruction and marginalisation of vulnerable cultural heritage, particularly maritime cultural heritage, which is subjected to additional environmental, climatic, and anthropogenic pressures. As a means of countering the challenges on current field research in the region and to further assess the damage and threats faced by archaeological fabric, this paper combines data from coastal and archaeological research conducted in the Gaza Strip to create a benchmark for the study of its maritime archaeology. Additional information on the alteration of coastal landscape is deduced through the analysis of aerial photographs and satellite imagery. This study falls within the scope of the Maritime Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and Africa Project (MarEA). MarEA aims to comprehensively document and assess vulnerable maritime archaeology (underwater, nearshore, coastal) and produce baseline information that can enhance existing infrastructure on archaeological monitoring and management.

The Middle East and North Africa have witnessed a surfeit of geospatial data collection projects, resulting in big databases with powerful deductive capacities. Despite the valuable insights and expansive evidentiary record offered by those databases, emphasis on anthropogenic threats to cultural heritage, combined with a limited integration of local perspectives, have raised important questions on the ethical and epistemological dimensions of big data. This paper contextualizes maritime cultural heritage (MCH) in those debates through the lens of the Maritime Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa project (MarEA). MarEA is developing a unique for the region database for MCH designed to amalgamate a baseline record emphasizing spatial location, state of preservation, and vulnerability. This record will form a stepping stone toward finer-grained research on MCH and its interdisciplinary intersections. It is also developed as an information resource to facilitate local collaborators in prioritizing site monitoring and developing documentation, management, and mitigation strategies.

Climate change threatens coastal archaeology through storm flooding (extreme sea-level: ESL), long-term sea-level rise (SLR) and coastal erosion. Many regions, like the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), lack key baseline evidence. We present initial results from a climate change threat assessment of MENA's coastal heritage using the Maritime Endangered Archaeology inventory: a geospatial database of MENA maritime archaeological sites incorporating a disturbance/ threat assessment. It informs two analyses of past disturbance and future threat: (1) using the integral threat/disturbance assessment, and (2) geospatial extraction of information from external coastal change models. Analysis suggests <5% of documented coastal sites are definitely affected by coastal erosion but up to 34% could also have experienced past flooding, erosion, or storm action. Climate change-related threats will increase over the 21st Century and accelerate post-2050 if carbon emissions remain high. SLR and ESL could impact 14–25% of sites by 2050 and 18–34% by 2100. Over 30% to 40% of sites could be impacted by erosion by 2050 and 2100 respectively. Whilst documentation is ongoing and there remain modeling uncertainties, this approach provides a means to redress the absence of baseline data on climate change threats to coastal cultural heritage in MENA .