SOUTH PONTE VEDRA BEACH | The well that Minorcan workers dug near the old governor’s plantation has faced the Intracoastal Waterway for centuries.

By the time Hurricane Matthew stopped whipping up the waves, water scooped away more than a foot of ground from sides of the stone well barely an arm’s length from the shoreline, peeling away protection for a piece of Northeast Florida’s past.

Situations like that kept Sarah Miller busy this fall.

Before the storm, the Flagler College archaeologist already was working on a project tracking how sea-level change is affecting archaeological sites.

Since the storm roughed up Florida’s coastline in October, volunteers and staff at the Florida Public Archaeology Network have measured, photographed and documented sites around Northeast Florida, creating a record of places that could eventually be washed away.

"We have to start tracking the changes at the sites," Miller said. "We don’t actually know when the last time was that [some] … sites have been visited."

That’s the idea behind Miller and others in the state-created archaeology network that uses volunteers from its Heritage Monitoring Scouts program to document conditions at locations around the state.

The results are recorded in a database that will track changes over time and can be used to manage problems like erosion and inundation that come with higher water levels.

Land managers responsible for state-owned property such as parks will use the same database and will be able to see information the volunteers gather.

RISK FROM RISING SEAS

There could be more to track in the future: A sea-level rise of 1 meter, about 39 inches, would affect about 2,900 archaeological sites around Florida, and another meter would raise the count to almost 4,000, said Emily Jane Murray, another archaeology network staffer.

"It’s important that they’ll be getting more eyes out there to see what’s happening," said Crystal Geiger, an archaeologist for St. Johns County who worked with the volunteers to check storm damage at historic cemeteries in the county.

Out of 46 privately owned historic cemeteries, Geiger said she checked about 15, and all but a few of the rest — places where owners declined visits or couldn’t be reached — were examined by the scouts.

Being able to check a lot of places quickly can matter after a hurricane because of federal deadlines to apply for recovery aid, although Geiger said her office steered property owners to applications they needed, but didn’t know how many followed through.

The scouts are a mix of college students, experienced archaeologists and enthusiasts who are trained on what to look for and record.

"I now look at the shell mounds a lot differently," Paul Dunn, a volunteer from Fernandina Beach, said about the first training he had in October at Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve.

An online checklist on the archaeologists’ website to describe conditions, visible threats and artifacts seen at the site is supposed to help volunteers consistently track information important to property managers.

The scout initiative only started in May and is still in an early phase where a mentor works with volunteers in carefully targeted areas. Those target areas have been public lands such as the Guana reserve, where the archaeologists recorded the condition of the Minorcan well in September, the month before Matthew struck.

The well, built around 1800 west of the spot where an English governor created and abandoned an indigo plantation decades earlier, was already part of a well-documented archaeological site called Shell Bluff Landing. The state paid in the 1990s to install a revetment of stones and a cloth liner along the bluff to break up waves and stabilize the ground.

There was a lightweight wooden barrier around the well, and photos taken in September showed its mouth roughly level with the ground, the earth dropping down to the revetment just a few feet away.

When Miller and Murray returned the week after the hurricane, ground that was photographed a month earlier was gone, and five layers of stone in the well’s wall stood exposed, with the river lapping closer and closer.

There are plenty of chances to preserve what’s left at the bluff, where the state installed a picnic table and signs describing the area’s use by American Indians for thousands of years.

But there are other areas where erosion, flooding and other effects of higher water can wipe away traces of the past. And in January, archaeologists will be at the Guana reserve again, training volunteers to document places like that.

Steve Patterson: (904) 359-4263