Collateral damage to cultural heritage may seem less pressing than the future human lives at risk, but it is worth taking note of and adding it to the ledgers:

Saving Scotland’s Heritage From the Rising Seas

Jim Dwyer, a New York Times reporter, and Josh Haner, a Times photographer, traveled to a Scottish archipelago in the North Atlantic to see how people are trying to save thousands of ancient structures.

Skara Brae.

Off the north coast of Scotland, Orkney’s soft green landscapes hold a trove of things from everyday life before history was written.

More than 3,000 archaeological sites — among them standing stone circles, Norse halls and a Neolithic tomb graffitied by Vikings — have endured for millenniums, scattered across the roughly 70 islands that make up the Orkney archipelago.

By Sarah Almukhtar | Source: Historic Environment Scotland Canmore. Note: Archaeological sites date from prehistoric times through the 20th century.

At Skara Brae, one of Europe’s best-preserved Stone Age villages, kitchens built around 3180 B.C. are fitted with hearths and cupboards, bedsteads and doors that could be bolted shut.

Today, in forays to remote spits of land, people are working to save some of these places for posterity from the climate changes accelerated by human activity.

About half of Orkney’s 3,000 sites, many built before Stonehenge or the pyramids, are under threat from those changes, according to the county archeologist. Some are already being washed away.

Tresness, a Neolithic chambered tomb on Sanday Island.

Since 1970, Orkney beaches have eroded twice as fast as in the previous century. Others that had been stable are now shrinking. Rains, falling heavier and more often, are dissolving the crusts of soil and sand packs that protect remnants of civilizations.

These threats, now familiar at world heritage sites around the globe, are being answered in Scotland by archaeologists, citizen-scientists, students, government agencies and academics.

Their work is urgent. Orkney’s stories are recorded in disappearing ink.

“Heritage is falling into the sea,” said Prof. Jane Downes, director of the Archaeology Institute at the University of Highlands and Islands. “It’s a very dramatic and obvious sign of sea level rise and increased storminess.”

From around the world, troops of archaeologists and students descend in the summers to dig, sift and catalogue imperiled places. There are scrambles for funds. “We’re focused on coastal sites because they’re going to be gone,” Professor Downes said.

At many spots, the only plausible kind of preservation is documentation — done swiftly.

In 1983, an archaeologist drew sketches of a Neolithic chambered tomb at the tip of a peninsula on Sanday island. Then the site was left essentially untouched until last year, when other researchers returned, planning to deploy new tools that would tell them where the people of that area came from and what they ate. But the tomb and its archaeology had shrunk: five feet had been lost to cliff erosion, and it was evident that the remaining 40 feet were headed for the water as well.…