One of the most common calls I get is about coastal erosion. Orkney, indeed Scotland, is known for its archaeology. It is not surprising, therefore, given the length of the coastline, and high energy content of the surrounding seas, that the remains of ancient sites are to be found, dropping out of the cliffs and sand dunes around the coast.

It is a distressing occurrence. Every wall that collapses; every midden that crumbles; every hearth that disappears: they all represent the loss of information about our common human past. You would be forgiven for thinking that it should be a simple task to record and document them all. As with so much in life, however, it is rarely that easy.

The investment of time required to record eroding archaeology is considerable. Professional archaeologists have little spare time, and prefer to spend it on the other elements of life (shopping, relaxing, gardening, you know the score). Archaeological employers are rarely prepared to pay people to focus on generic ‘good works’. Citizen archaeologists can play a fantastic role, especially those who follow a daily walking routine, perhaps along a particular stretch of coast. But they need advice, supervision, support. And they have to be dedicated: the sea will not hold back just because you have gone on holiday, or it is raining. There are places around the UK where eroding sites are noted, and there are organisations prepared to help. There is a lot of good work going on. But it is a never-ending task and has yet to be comprehensive.

The problem is that once you have recorded the eroding face of a site, you are merely waiting for it to collapse once more before you have to start again. Behind the section of every eroding wall or midden lies the rest of the site: vulnerable to the elements as soon as the face of the shore is cut back. There is no doubt that many eroding sites merit full scale excavation. And equally no doubt that, given the cost of any archaeological excavation, finance for this will never be forthcoming. There is no developer to pay for the project where coastal erosion is concerned; the fragile sites here become the responsibility of the local council or national heritage authority. Neither have adequate funding to tackle excavation and all the associated analysis of every, or even some, of the coastal sites in their area.

There is, undoubtedly, more work that could be done. Funded analysis of the coastline would allow us to target stretches that are more vulnerable to erosion and improve management by prioritising recording towards those sites that are more in danger of loss. Local people could be encouraged to take responsibility for monitoring and recording erosion as it happens. In Scotland, the excellent Scape Trust provides a variety of resources and training to support those who are enthusiastic about walking the coast on a regular basis in order to keep an eye out for archaeological losses. In England, the CITiZAN Discovery programme facilitates a variety of recording projects around the coast.

Our coasts are beautiful, and undoubtedly a resource to be treasured. Sadly, they are also fragile, and as such, the source of considerable archaeological loss. Coastal walking is a great way to get in to archaeology and it is undoubtedly rewarding – you won’t have to look far before you spot a site to record. In the absence of unlimited personnel and funds, we can but do our best to make sure that we have a note of every site as it falls in to the sea.

An ongoing research project reminds us of the ways in which archaeology encompasses even the most recent and widest uses of material culture. Orkney Energy Landscapes is a collaborative project between The Archaeology Institute, UHI, here in Orkney, and the University of St Andrews. It has been designed to look at the way our need for energy has helped to shape the landscape through the millennia. From peat cuttings to wind and marine turbines, the machinery created to service our energy requirements is visible within any local environment, and Orkney has a particularly rich record that extends from the earliest times to the present day.

It is an exciting project.

The need for energy has always been a part of human life and it has left a footprint on the landscape. In Orkney for many millennia it was integral to the local culture of self-sufficiency, satisfied by peat-cutting, the collection of driftwood, and other small-scale sources of power.  In recent decades, though Orkney is now well-connected into mainstream electricity, oil and other grids, local developments have once again seen some exciting responses to fulfilling that need into the future. As the parameters of energy production have changed, so we have come to an increasing realisation that traditional energy sources based on fossil fuels were not going to be sustainable into the future nor were they compatible with maintaining a stable climate. The result has been some interesting new footprints on the landscape. It is nice to think that these are seen as worthy of record while they are still fresh in people’s memories. How many times have we wished that we could have been present while the great stones at monuments like the Stones of Stenness were raised, or seated round the fire at Skara Brae for an evening of storytelling?

At the same time, it is interesting to consider how the traces of contemporary energy production show continuity with the past. Our need for power may have changed in scale, but it has never left us. Those of us who make use of rechargeable batteries for home or car maintain a direct link to our ancestors as they lifted a peat or log from the stack to place on the fire. We share a liking for hot food whether we use an induction hob, or carefully balanced pot. I rather like the way in which, in Orkney at least, our needs can once more be fulfilled by local generation. It also fun to trace the changing echoes of those needs as they have become fossilized into the landscape around us.

Finally, the project is, to me, significant because of the way in which it demonstrates that archaeology is not just concerned with dusty and ruinous relics. The links between archaeology and electric cars or the generation of hydrogen may seem tenuous, but they are there. They will be obvious to those who come after us. For now they provide a brilliant evocation of the relevance of our profession to the present and even to the future.

For the past few centuries humans have shared a remarkable ability to transform the world around us. What we put into the landscape today impacts on the look of that landscape in the future. This is a vital truism, but one that we have been slow to accept. Maybe we have just been shortsighted in our vision. Maybe we have been selfish. Whatever; we have now developed a more socially responsible ethos to the way we work. We are, at last, only too aware of the consequences, foreseen and unforseen, of our actions and our structures. Many of those consequences are long lasting, and sometimes these impacts are unforeseen. Today, we weigh the impact of what we develop and what we do. As the study of the way in which material culture impacts on the physical world over long spans of time, archaeology is uniquely placed to contribute to this.

To date, archaeology has been preoccupied with teaching us to read the record of the past. That is the role it fulfills in the popular imagination. But it is a role that is changing. I would argue that archaeology is also a significant tool to help us shape the future of the world in which we live. Hopefully we are starting to see a shift in emphasis to the future…

I’m often asked about the lessons that archaeology can offer the populations of today. In particular, people are interested to know about research on past sea-level and climate change. In general, I am sceptical that archaeology has anything much to offer. Population levels today are so much higher than they ever were in the past and our lifestyles are so different. We are consumers to an extent that just did not exist in the early postglacial. We expect so much more and, at the same time, we are no longer flexible in the way that we once were.

The people of prehistory were able to move and adapt in ways that would be unthinkable today. Archaeology can show us the sort of changes that they made, but it does not tell us much about how to achieve the same sort of equilibrium in the context of today.

To compound the problem, we rely on elements of the world that they avoided precisely because they recognised inherent fragilities. In this way many of our biggest cities are located along vulnerable waterfronts, we consume great quantities of water for so much more than drinking, we cultivate food on land once deemed too boggy or too marginal, and our transport systems are fixed and inflexible.

Developing technologies have led us to believe that we have the answer to everything. that we can control the world around us. We are only slowly learning that that is not the case.

It occurs to me that an interesting exception lies in the current interest in Rewilding.

Rewilding Britain say that ‘Rewilding is the large-scale restoration of ecosystems where nature can take care of itself’. It goes on to say that it seeks to ‘reinstate natural processes’ and encourages ‘a balance between people and the rest of nature where each can thrive’.

The use of the prefix ‘re’ indicates the significance of an ethos to hark back to the past. Rewilding is about the reintroduction of species, both plant and animal, and the use of ‘natural’ management processes in order to drive a landscape that moves away from the intensive human-centric focus of recent centuries.

It seems to me that there is an inherent flaw in this vision. Surely rewilding should be about moving into a better future rather than harking back to the past.

For example, there is little indication of how rewilding might sit within the urban landscapes of twenty-first century Britain. Rewilding Britain has several examples of rewilding projects, but they all take place in rural, even remote, settings. The sorts of locations where people were talking of the power of wilderness not so long ago. And yet, if rewilding is really to offer a way forward (and I do think it had much to offer), it has to offer something more dramatic than the conversion of wilderness.

True wilderness is rare, even non-existent, in Britain today. I’m glad to see increasing recognition of the way in which people have shaped every corner of this land over the last ten thousand years. From the highest mountain top to the lowest bog, nowhere has escaped the influence of our ancestors. It does still slightly alarm me, however, that many seem to seek a return to a cosy, imagined, past. A past before all this modern ‘nonsense’ of environmental destruction and human fragility occurred. That past does not exist.

It occurs to me that archaeology does have a strong role to play here. That role is brought to the fore with the advent of rewilding. Archaeology holds key information relating to species history: just what is it appropriate to reintroduce and where? How did different animal species relate to people? How did people relate to animal species? What influence might different population levels bring? Archaeology can tell us not only when a species became extinct, but how. We can use it to make sure that the species we encourage were really there in the first place; there have been cases where people made assumptions about woodland, for example, where pollen analysis has shown tree cover to be absent. It can help us to investigate not just the rewilding of remote areas, but the practicalities of denser living in a new world.

True rewilding will make considerable demands on all of us. But it is not all doom and gloom. We have, for example, become used to an abundant diet that makes use of a seemingly endless choice of foods. Yet many of those foods derive from exotic origins and carry considerable cost. At the same time, we have abandoned a startling variety of local foods. Perhaps if we were prepared to eat slightly less and make use of a wider range of the wild and seasonal produce that grows closer to home, then we could cut the environmental cost of living. To date this has been a middle-class aspiration for those of us with money and time to seek out expensive local ingredients. Rewilding could change that, but only if it goes further than simply changing the appearance of our surroundings. If it is to succeed then rewilding has to develop new systems, new economies wherein the values of western society are altered.

Rewilding has to look forward not back. It is not so much about restoring ancient grazing patters, or ancient woodlands as about using our understanding of them to create a totally new landscape for the people who will come after us.

The alllure of the past is strong, but it is also dangerous. The past is an imagined place, often regarded as safe and protective. It provides a vision of comfort for those unsettled by the uncertainties of today. Those who lived through ‘the past’ would, I am sure, have been quick to put us right in no uncertain terms. It is our misfortune that we can never meet them.

Archaeology can help us to understand both the present and the past. And it can help us to think about the future. Information about the past can be used to help  construct a more viable future. I’m interested to see this sort of information rising in significance today and hopeful that some will take it up. Whether they will have to power to recognise the scale of change necessary and convince the rest of us to accept it remains to be seen.

Archaeology, it seems to me, is central to this.

And, in a nice postscript, my attention has just been drawn to a recent paper on Wildness in the free-to-read journal Internet Archaeology.

We are slowly moving out of Summer and into Autumn. This time of year is often one of warmer, more settled weather up here in the north, and this year it is very welcome. In general, it has been a bad summer. Temperatures have been low and there has been a lot of rain.

The changing of the season is subtle. When you live in a town you hardly notice it until it is done – you are wearing your thicker coat every day, you expect it to rain and the heating is on to its winter settings. The flowering plants have ceased to bloom, and the garden looks decidedly autumnal. Today we are prompted more by human constructs: the return to school; bonfire night; putting the clocks back. Events such as these make us acutely aware of the passing of the year. There will soon be Christmas decorations in the shops, the annual countdown of shopping days will start, and people will begin to ask about your festive plans.

Out in the countryside we are a bit more aware of the elements: the evenings are getting darker; rainstorms become more visible; the parking spot to the back of the house is more exposed. We still live in a world largely of our making, however. How were the seasons heralded in prehistory? I think it was a more rounded sensory experience.  Not only were there changes in light and temperature; there would be bird song, the wildlife encountered while undertaking daily tasks would change. The noises that made up the backdrop to daily life would shift. Journeys might take longer as ground conditions changed: boggy land became hard to cross once more, streams were faster flowing and it would be necessary to seek new crossing points; shelter from autumnal gales was required for the camp site. Diet adjusted to make use of the available resources.

Without the cushioning effect of modern technology, the mind would turn to a different taskscape as we move from one season to the next. Nowadays we change our lives so little throughout the year. Our prehistoric forebears would have an intuitive grasp of the work that became necessary as the year moved on. Since childhood, their lives were finely attuned to the rhythms of life that heralded the approach of each new season. Warm clothing had to be prepared and mended. Some foods required processing and storage. There might be fuel to collect against a run of heavy snowfall or other conditions that restricted access to the outdoors. Raw materials for tools could be amassed to be worked across long evenings. Beds and living spaces needed final preparations against coming hardship. As the year changed, so did the world, and so did we.

I find it quite hard to imagine a lifestyle like this. Yet, in some ways, I am shocked at how quickly we have lost the grasp of living at one with the world around us. Go back a couple of centuries, and those who lived outside of the town would still have retained much of the ancient connection to surroundings that enabled human life down the centuries. Go back a few centuries further and it operated even within larger settlements.

I’m wondering whether it is this disconnection that makes it so hard for us to make the adjustments necessary for the great challenges that we face now. They are, perhaps, the greatest challenges ever faced by the collective human community since we had to make the decision as to whether, or not, to move just that little bit further away from our home territories – a decision that would lead, ultimately, to human colonisation around the globe. Somehow, we seem unable to grasp the way in which the world will move on, whether or not, we chose to go with it. I feel a bit as if I am observing a small child having a tantrum because some well-loved routine has been altered. We seem to have developed a sense of entitlement: we like our fossil fuels; we like our exotic foods; we like our connectivity. They work well now; surely we are owed the fruits of our technological labour, fruits that assure us such comfortable lives. Today we seem to feel that we live on the world, not in it. Our ancestors would have begged to differ. I’m straying out of my comfort zone, but I have a feeling that we are not owed anything. I have a feeling that we will have to cast aside many of the things that we have come to take for granted. I’m not worried about the future of the world, but I am concerned that her messages to us are falling on deaf ears. I’m hoping we can open our senses once more and step back in tune with the world around us.

I’ve been working on a text about life in Mesolithic Scotland for a teaching resource. It has got me thinking about one of my favourite subjects: the ways in which our life differs so much from that of our Mesolithic ancestors and yet we still value skills that would have been very familiar to those who made their home here eight thousand years ago.

Today, we are accustomed to the home comforts that support our lifestyle. We take them for granted: central heating; hot water; sophisticated bathrooms and kitchens; an abundant and diverse diet; the convenience of shops that can provide for our every need, and transport at the touch of a button. While it is true that contemporary society accommodates a remarkable disparity between those with access to plenty of money and those who manage on very little, it is also the case that all aspire to certain elements of life and those who direct the apportioning of resources generally seek to facilitate a certain standard of living that makes use of aspects of the elements mentioned above.

Yet most of us have little idea of the processes behind them. The generation of electricity, the production of our complex foodstuffs, and the building of our houses all remain, by and large, a mystery and few of us possess the knowhow to create these for ourselves. The exigencies of dense populations and dwindling resources mean that even in extreme situations, such as most refugee camps, the authorities ensure survival by working to maintain distribution networks rather than facilitating on the spot production.  For those of us lucky enough to live within the urban west (and I include myself here in Orkney because the landscape of my home is nothing if not created by its human population) it has become hard to imagine a world in which these ‘basic essentials’ did not exist. It is hard to conceive a world in which individuals had to provide for themselves.

We have lost many of the links to nature that were once a fundamental element of life. Many of us only notice the passing of the seasons as a backdrop against which our lives play out. We go for a walk on a sunny day, we seek relaxation on a beach in the summer, when it rains we go indoors, winter storms will lead us to turn up the central heating and light the stove. Yet these links were once a vital part of our survival. Through them we understood when and where to seek for certain foods. We recognised the need to prepare and store a surplus to see us through the winter. We appreciated the qualities of different woods that allowed us to burn a long slow fire through a winter’s night, or a hot fire for cooking, a smoky fire to preserve meat. Today, we have forgotten the way in which the world (nature, weather, seasons), once ruled our daily routines.

I find it fascinating, therefore, that, as we apparently become more distanced from the world in which we live, we have, on the other hand, increasingly come to appreciate the skills of bushcraft. Foraged foods have become an increasingly popular part of exclusive restaurants and people will pay a lot to spend a few days learning ‘survival techniques’. There is a plethora of books on the subject and it is a frequent element of television, from straightforward educational programmes to a slightly weird component of some reality tv.

Where, you might well ask, is this all leading? By combining an understanding of the archaeology with knowledge of the ways of woodland and countryside, we can begin to approach and understand those of our earliest ancestors for whom these things were second nature. Maybe that is a bit purist. I feel that it also helps us to appreciate and think more about how we live today. What we have got. How we use resources. Perhaps it helps us to feel at one with the world. The success of technology over the last few millennia has led us to become distanced and complacent. We need to retrace our steps.

Stuck out in the North Atlantic on a cruise ship that was dodging the weather last autumn, I found myself thinking about just how much we take our world for granted. This year, an exceptionally active hurricane season has affected both sea and land. The impact on the land is well documented in news broadcasts. That over the sea might be considered to be less but, it can be significant nonetheless.

We still rely on marine transport systems for many goods to travel from one continent to another. Tourism, and in particular the cruise industry, has become a major economic force. Itineraries are drawn up under the assumption that the journey from one exotic destination to another will be ‘plain sailing’. The ironic significance of the phrase is no longer lost on me, though one has, perhaps, to experience severe travel disruption before its impact in the days of sail can be fully realised.

When a cruise vessel has to change plans, the knock on effect is twofold. Firstly, there is the ship: those on board find that their holiday plans remain unfulfilled, while the company may see its profits dwindle as alternative plans, and routes, are put into place. Secondly, there are the communities that were set to play host. Many of these are surprisingly small, often with fragile economies. Tours are cancelled, guides have an unexpected day off, there is likely to be a glut of cake and scones as cafes face up to a lack of expected customers.

Somehow, it comes as a shock to everyone.

And yet, the weather remains one aspect of the modern globe that we cannot control. Surely we should not be surprised. The last few decades have been, on balance, pretty stable. Perhaps we have been lulled into a false sense of security. Or superiority. Travel, and transport, are part of the foundations of twenty-first century society and we have come to take it for granted that they will work as planned. I doubt that the Norse seafarers who crossed this section of the ocean with monotonous regularity felt quite the same. Neither, I suspect, did the crews of the clippers and other sailing vessels who worked their way across the seas. Much less the prehistoric groups who made their way along the coasts of northwest Europe at the end of the Ice Age.

I feel that one, unlooked for, aspect by which one might define society today and contrast it with earlier communities, is that we have become arrogant. Somehow I don’t think that they had quite such unshakeable belief that their technologies could master whatever the world might throw at them. Yes, they built endless stone circles, ceremonial centres and sacred places through which we assume they sought to propitiate their gods and ensure the future of the human race. But somehow one gets the impression that they were working with the world rather than against it. They encompassed a degree of flexibility in their lives. We, in contrast, seem to have set ourselves up against the forces of nature. And we are less flexible.

I’d prefer to return to a broader view of the world and our place in it. It might be a slower path, the outcome might be more uncertain, but it is, I think, the only way that our future can be assured.