Most successful interpretations have been the result of team research, using geological field and analytical techniques in concert with the expertise of archaeologists, historians, classicists, and scholars in many other disciplines. For example, history, oral tradition, and cartography tell us the details of major storm surges in the North Sea in the 14th and 17th centuries. These storms destroyed hundreds of low-lying towns and villages. Geologists and archaeologists can still study the remains of the settlements in the tidal flat regions. Increased storminess and the mining of low-lying peats, which deflated the coastal landscapes, led to catastrophe.
Marine transgressions are about to destroy a large medieval church on Poland's Baltic coast.
On the southwestern peninsula of Greece, a small sixth century Byzantine church has just fallen into the sea. Such examples remind us that a great portion of the evidence of human occupation of the Holocene coastal landscape is now long gone, destroyed or buried under the sea as transgression and inundation continue along 75 percent of the world's coastal zone. Also, humans, have caused major environmental and geographical changes since ancient times. A Mycenean dam was constructed during the Bronze Age in the Argoilid, Greece, to ameliorate flooding in the lower city of the fortification of Tiryns. In another example, ancient Troy of the Iliad originally lay on the end of a cuesta in a marine embayment south of the Dardanelles.