Archaeology and sclerochronology of marine bivalves

Abstract

In a rapidly changing world, maintenance of the good health of the marine environment requires a detailed understanding of its mechanisms of change, and the ability to detect early signals of a shift away from the equilibrium state that we assume characterized it before there was any significant human impact. Given that instrumental measurements of the oceans go back no further than a few decades, the only way in which we can assess the long-term baseline variability that characterizes the pre-perturbation equilibrium state of the marine environment is by the use of proxy records contained in stratified or layered natural archives such as corals, fish otoliths and bivalve mollusc shells. In this chapter we will look at the ways in which the environmental signals recorded in the shells of bivalve molluscs can be used to shed light on marine variability both in the present and over past centuries and millennia, and specifically how they can be used to study marine climate, the marine environment and the economic and cultural history of the relationship between humans and the oceans. The chapter is divided into two parts: section one describes the morphological, geochemical and crystallographic techniques that are used to obtain information from the shells, while section two covers the use of bivalve shells in a wide range of applications, including ecosystem services, environmental monitoring, archaeology, climate reconstruction, and climate modeling.