A buried river, an emerging crisis, a cumulative tale

ABSTRACT As climate change alters our cities, a better knowledge of past environments is necessary to understand current flooding patterns and anticipate future ones. This cumulative tale is a narrative riff on the comparison between history and archaeology, that each dig into layers of time and soil, respectively. By starting at the surface of a present-day flooding issue and digging into both the landscape and historic sources, the cumulative tale relates the burial of Miller’s River, once the boundary between Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts. This article explains how a repeatedly forgotten river and its altered environs complicate current and future life in the greater Boston metro area and points to many other buried waterways that pose similar problems.