While others were perfecting their sourdough recipes, or embroidering replicas of the Bayeux Tapestry, I was working with the members of Mesolithic Deeside and various associated archaeologists to produce a publication of the first three years of work of the group. The final words might be mine – but the hard work was undertaken by many others. I had a wealth of reports and field notes, all supplied by the team, from which to hone our document. There were also extensive photographs, maps and drawings – all put together through the talent of others.

Did we succeed in producing an informative but readable account? Download it from the link here and judge for yourself. I think it is a fascinating story, but then I am biased.

The other thing to note here is all the help and expertise we have received from others. From the National Lottery Heritage Fund who provided the funding that got the group going, to Aberdeenshire Council Archaeology Service who were always there with support and advice, and Historic Environment Scotland who have supported the final publication, as well as many, many other funding bodies along the way. Then there was the fantastic team at the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland who edited and published the final report as part of their wonderful Scottish Archaeological Internet Reports series (wonderful not just for the content but also because it is freely available – not a paywall in sight). And so many people along the way. Community archaeology is a brilliant evocation of the variety of skills that can be brought to bear on unravelling the past when people care.

I won’t say that there were not moments when I woke up in the middle of the night and despaired at the size of the task I had taken on. But for me the end result justifies those odd moments of reflection (and I do love writing).

The work of Mesolithic Deeside continues. No matter how much we know about the work of the past, there is always more to learn. If you want to join in, get in touch with them. It is fun – and healthy! And hopefully there will be more volumes like this one: the finds, and sites, since 2019 are already beginning to mount up!

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…

Sites are key to the work of an archaeologist. But what, exactly, do we mean by a site? It is a term that we use all of the time, but it has become so commonplace that we rarely stop to consider what we are talking about. It is worthwhile pausing and reflecting.

It is a complicated situation from the start. When an archaeologist talks about a site, they might mean one of two things:

• A location of interest in the present day – a place where archaeological material occurs, and which has the potential for visiting and, possibly, investigation.
• A location of interest in the past – a place where people did things.

I’ve covered the latter definition and the problems we encounter when trying to weigh up the relative significance of locations in previous blog entries. But I have also been thinking about the former in relation to the project I’m working on just now. And, the two blur together.

The issues relate to a fieldwalking project in farmland outside Aberdeen. The location of all the individual finds has to be recorded and the easiest way to do this is, of course, with a dGPS, but we also need a shorthand way in which to know how different groups of finds might relate to other groups. The most obvious method is to relate the finds to the fields in which they have been picked up. This tried and tested method has been used successfully for over a century; fields have names and you will find that most fieldwalking projects use them to refer to individual ‘sites’.

It works. Or does it?

There are some problems.

Field boundaries are not static and when a project takes place over a number of years some of these boundaries, inevitably, change. Fields often become bigger: two ‘sites’ may be amalgamated into one. On occasion they are subdivided: one ‘site’ may become two. In addition, it is not uncommon to walk one field and then, perhaps a few years later when the adjacent field is ploughed, that might be walked as well. If two similar assemblages are found in the adjoining fields, does that mean that there are two sites? Or is it really one site? The boundaries of today are, after all, modern constructs that have no relation to the communities of prehistory.

The nomenclature can become difficult and it only gets more complex as, with time, more and more of the countryside is covered. Gradually, a nice mosaic of individual field ‘sites’ will blur into a broader spread with varying lithic densities and contents across the land. At this point, careful record keeping, while tricky, becomes vital. We need to know where the evidence has been found, but the analysis has to expunge the modern boundaries if it is to provide a valid interpretation of the past.

As you see, our instinctive use of the word site is laden with issues. I’m not sure at this stage that we can resolve them. It is too deeply embedded into the archaeological consciousness for us to change our conversation and use terms like research locus, or activity spot – and both of those sound horribly jargonistic and pedantic. But I do think it is useful to be careful that we say what we mean to say. We need to be clear. What are we talking about when we say ‘site’?

• Do we mean the individual field?
• Do we mean the geographic focus of our research?
• Do we mean the general farm or community where the finds have been made?
• Do we mean the spot where people did something in prehistory?

It is no bad thing to remind ourselves that the names we give are always modern and relate more to our own use of the land than use in the past. It is no bad thing to remind ourselves that we need to be clear about what we mean. And it is certainly no bad thing to remind ourselves of the importance of accurate and comprehensive record keeping.

In this way it is possible to build a picture of the ways in which people have used the landscape of the past and, if you are lucky, to visualise this behind the landscape that meets the eye today.

Just occasionally other people make use of my work. This week there are two such publications.Landscapes Revealed, now published by Oxbow Books, details the results of geophysical survey around the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site. It has been a mammoth effort, incorporating nearly 20 yeasrs of work from first inception to publication, but the result is well worthwhile. Not only do you have a listing of all the sites recorded (and this is a full landscape), but you also have a detailed discussion of the changing patterns of human activity across the area set into the wider Orkney context. It makes for a fascinating read.

Sadly the decision was taken not to annotate individual contributions other than in the acknowledgements, but you will find two sections that detail the results of the research undertaken by myself and my colleagues around Skara Brae (pp 61-65) and on the submerged landscape of the Loch of Stenness (pp 216-220).

The second ‘publication’ takes me further back. In 1988 I was lucky enough to journey through Pakistan and China. In common with other academics I took many photographs – all on slide film. In recent years I have been worrying about the deterioration of the slides all neatly boxed up in drawers in my study. Luckily an organisation known as the Historic Environment Image Resource, in Oxford, were able to come to the rescue. They seek to digitise old slides, particularly of sites and landscapes, with a view to preserving images of these locations for posterity. It is a fantastic service and an important one.

Some of my images were labled, many were not. They have recently completed their work on my material and used it to illustrate a blog about the work they do. I’d urge you to have a look at their website – there is a wealth of amazing material there. Where better to escape our current anxieties than losing yourself in the glories of the past?

It is always good to see a piece of research come to publication. In this case it brings back memories of a wonderful trip into the Cairngorms around the time of my 50th birthday to have a look at the location of some Mesolithic finds that had recently come to light during maintenance work on the National Trust for Scotland footpath at Chest of Dee on the Mar Lodge estate.

It was a wonderful location and the lithics were interesting. Evidence for the early communities who used this landscape is hard to find so we were all quite excited. Since then, with the enthusiasm of members of the National Trust for Scotland, Aberdeenshire Archaeology Service, and the Universities of Aberdeen and University College Dublin, we have mounted a programme of archaeological investigation.

Of course, the fieldwork was fun! But as many know, the out-of-doors bit is only a tiny part of any archaeological project. Over the years we have been slowly analysing the finds and drawing in other information in order to try and tease out a picture of the landscape and those who lived there, or passed through it some 9000 years ago.

It is a slow process but we can finally share our thoughts in published form. I hope you find them as interesting as we do.

The project, meanwhile, continues – albeit in a piecemeal fashion. What is interesting is that with the help of Mesolithic Deeside we have been able to extend our thinking to look at the length of the River Dee right down to the sea. These big (for Scotland) rivers were important for all sorts of reasons to the early communities who lived in Scotland and we have a rare chance to build a pretty full picture of the traces they have left along the banks.

So – the work goes on, but it is nice to see this publication out.