The programme had a lot to recommend it. It covered the investigation in detail, explained the thought processes of the team, why they were using the particular techniques in question, how they drew their conclusions, and the contribution made by the study to pre-existing research. One of the very positive features lay in the way in which the significance of landscape archaeology was emphasised. There were, however, negative aspects, not least the way in which research on Stonehenge was presented as exclusively a male preoccupation in which the female contribution was confined to presenting a running commentary linking us to previous research and the wider Neolithic world. Of course, this is a very necessary contribution, and one which is often overlooked. Nevertheless, to present women as passive commentators in the active world of archaeology does not reflect the reality of the profession and, more importantly, can hardly be encouraging to those considering entering the profession for a career.

I’m not totally naive and I understand why media coverage has to focus on the spectacular. It plays a significant role in keeping people interested in the minutiae of our investigations. But, there is a whole other world out there, one which rarely makes the national stage, though it does, increasingly and satisfyingly, get smaller-scale publicity.

Every week, if not every day, a host of local people gird their loins and venture out, whatever the weather, to walk and re-walk fields, to check the shores of lochs and rivers, to scan the dunes and cliffs of eroding beaches. Some take fancy equipment, others a simple bunch of plastic bags and a gps. Some have years of archaeological training, most do not. All have oodles of enthusiasm and experience.

These people are all archaeologists and their contribution is as significant as that of those who make up the high-profile teams. They find, and record, the nuts and bolts of the past – small sites, unremarkable finds: the detritus of the sort of everyday lives that most of us live. These are the lives that were experienced by people in the past. They are the lives that archaeology seeks to unravel and illustrate.

High status, glitzy, sites carry a reward of their own but they do little to illustrate the commonality of ordinary life in the past. We learn little of what it may have been like to be a Neolithic farmer while watching the presentation of the newest pits to surround Stonehenge. While those who bring this new detail to life and reap the rewards of media attention are certainly to be applauded, surely it is the host of hard work that goes on to unpick the details of the rest of the traces of the past that we should really be acknowledging. The people who find joy in the ‘boring’ material, who undertake the daily trudge come wind and rain; people on whom we can rely to continue to unearth the tiniest of details however mundane. They do not seek status or reward. But their contribution is no less important – to me it is more significant. Lets not lose sight of their input.

And, to return to a bugbear. We live in a diverse world. Diversity existed in the past. Archaeology is a diverse profession. Surely we do not need to make much of an effort to reflect that in all we do?

obscure the narratives that we build about past lives. We also have to be careful that our own, twenty-first century, boundaries do not encroach on our interpretations of the past. (You might argue here that it is impossible to avoid personal bias; perhaps it is more accurate to say that we need to be aware of the ways in which our lived experience can skew our ideas about others, both those who live in other circumstances and those who lived in other times).

In my own experience, there is quite a strong divide between the domestic sphere of life and the spiritual side. While I don’t completely eschew the spiritual side at home, I tend to make use of specialised locations elsewhere in order to practice it. Thus, while I might ponder on the future of humanity while doing the washing up, or discuss the meaning of life after a leisurely meal, I would usually visit a church or other specialised location in order to celebrate a wedding, mark a funeral, or participate in ceremonial occasions. I do not have any particular fittings or furnishings at home to assist in ritual devotion, nor is there any particular corner of my house that is set aside for worship of any sort.

Of course, this does rather depend on your definition of devotion. I have a larder: could that be a space that is set aside for the celebration of food. I have a garage, though before you state the obvious, I would point out that I do not keep the car in it, it serves more as a repository for rubbish between my infrequent visits to the tip. The cat has its own special corner (which it ignores). In general, I think that my household, with its primarily secular design, reflects most households in the communities with which I am most familiar.

What I am trying to say is that in the society I know and love we have buildings for ‘living’ and we have buildings for spiritual devotion, and we keep the two sides of life very separate.

This is not so in all cultures, and it most certainly was not so everywhere in the past. It may not even have been common. Dwellings may well have included space, even furnishings, that was set aside for contemplation and worship. ‘Spiritual’ may well have been an integral part of ‘domestic’.

The Neolithic settlement site of Skara Brae in Orkney is known for the well-preserved suite of stone-built furniture to be seen inside the houses. A significant part of this lies in the shelved units that lie on the far side of the room from the entrance. These would have been prominent to those entering the space and in the nineteenth century they were ascribed the rather prosaic name, and use, of ‘dresser’. Today, many archaeologists would recognise the likelihood that they blended everyday storage and display with a deeper layer of meaning to include aspects of spirituality and ceremony. Yet, when asked to refer to them in a television documentary as ‘shrines’, I found that hard. The, to me, over interpretive nature of the term, felt wrong.

Whatever the nature of the Skara Brae furnishings, one mark of the successful archaeologist in the twenty-first century lies in their ability to eschew the rigid definitions of the past and embrace a more fluid world where all is not necessarily as it seems and boundaries are there to be challenged. Those who lived a strictly religious life still had to eat, prayer allowed those who built houses to assure a future.

Pigeonholes are useful – but should not become all-embracing. When we look at a space, we should try to blend the possibilities of interpretation.

Hindsight, we are told, is a wonderful thing. In many ways, it is. But in some ways, it can hinder our view of the world.

Over the past few years, I have been part of a team researching the changing landscape of Orkney, in particular in relation to change that is driven by the rising relative sea-levels around the islands throughout the Early Holocene. In addition to the physical changes in the world around the early communities of Orkney, I am interested in the mental challenges for the people themselves. How did people make sense of the dynamic world in which they found themselves?

It has gradually become apparent to me that our interpretation of the impact of this change on those who made Orkney their home is greatly influenced by our own experience of climate change today. Of course, this is hardly surprising. We filter everything we do and think through the mesh of familiarity. But, the people of the past did not have the benefit (or limitations) of our understanding. If we only see the past through this light, then we can never begin to approach an idea of how they might have experienced life. We have to try to push ourselves out of it.

We have been lucky enough to experience a world that has been, very generally, pretty stable for the last few centuries. Relative sea-level, in Western Europe and the Northern Hemisphere, has not changed greatly. My world view sees the physical shape of the land as, more or less, naturally immutable. Over time, I have learnt how this is not the case: that mountains grow and erode, rivers wander, coastlines recede or approach – but I do not expect to experience alteration at a personal level, and I do not have the sort of connection with previous generations that affords me a collective memory of this sort of dynamism. Others might.

My lifestyle also lacks flexibility. I depend on the infrastructure of tarmacadam and rail for travel, I require a house with stone or concrete foundations, my food is gathered from all corners of the world into a massive structural depot, without a constant supply of energy carefully generated and distributed it all starts to fall apart.

The idea of change to the fabric of the world is, to me, very threatening.

But things were not so for the earliest prehistoric communities to live in Orkney, Scotland, the British Isles. Change was, for them, part of life. Many experienced a degree of sea-level change that would have been, though not visible from year to year, at least memorable from generation to generation. Some might have known stories of times of unusual cold, or heat and drought. Others might have heard of great herds of animals that no longer roamed the countryside they knew and loved. The dynamic nature of the world was, for them, normal.

It was the way things were.

In relation to sea-level rise, in particular, I find this fascinating.

Those who experienced the gradually rising relative sea-levels of the Early Holocene had no idea that sea-level rise would end. That is our privilege. For them, sea-level rise was normal. Dry land decreased; water increased. It was the way of the world. How did they build that into their view of life?

Did they feel threatened? They were, certainly, more flexible and adaptable than us. Population levels were low. Did they rely on the fact that they had always been here and could move to new locations as conditions worsened. Was this part of their place in the world, part of their relationship with nature? We seem to find ourselves too frequently in opposition to nature these days: it was not always so in the past. Did they accept a degree of fatality that individual peoples might change or even disappear? Did they experience uncertainty, perhaps even anger, and articulate it into a relationship with deities or a spiritual realm as they tried to ensure the continued existence of future generations?

We will never know. And, of course, over time, different communities in different times and places will have mediated their way through the uncertainties of the world in many different ways.

What we can do is try to strip away our own relationship with the world of today and build on a framework of past particulars in order to develop our ideas of these particular aspects of the lives of those who came before. Hindsight, in this case, does not help.

I am old enough to remember the introduction of immersive ‘time travel’ type heritage displays. They often involved using electric ‘cars’ to progress through a reconstruction, or series of reconstructions, of the past. There were even sounds, and appropriate smells, along the way. I, along with many others, loved them. Today, I think most people will have experienced this sort of thing.

I can remember some heated debate about the ‘sanitizing’ of the picture they presented. There were no horrible wounds or injuries, no distressing sights, the acoustic background inevitably contained bird song, and bad smells were confined to the merest whiff of body odour. Rats and other vermin were invariably cute, and the people, generally, well fed, and healthy. It is generally the same when you watch a television drama, or read a novel. Our view of the past was, in essence, comfortable.

Recently, however, I’ve begun to notice that things are changing. Museums are tackling more challenging aspects of the past and the displays can be thought provoking, even disturbing. The realities of our inhumanity to each other can linger in the mind long after we have got home and poured that restorative gin.

It is the same with television and novels. Producers are less worried about exploring material that might once have been deemed ‘unsuitable’. And novels can be downright depressing. Not surprisingly, perhaps, living through the current twenty-first century pandemic, I have tended to go for lighter, uplifting, reading matter. I have, perhaps, avoided thinking too deeply about the awfulness of life. Inasmuch as I thought about it at all, it did not worry me that heritage interpretation presented a rosy view of the past. We all know that the past was often difficult and gruesome. Don’t we? Did we really need to be reminded of the horrors?

I have been trying to challenge myself to stick with more difficult reading matter, and it is not that hard. Indeed, I have found it rewarding. Maybe this just says more about myself, but I am beginning to feel that we can no longer take the downside for granted. We are never going to touch on all the varied aspects of life. But we do ourselves no favours by blocking out the bits we don’t like.

There is scope for new interpretations in all fields of life. There is definitely scope to embark on new trains of thought, new challenges, new ways of seeing the past. Discomfort is relative, but it is no bad thing to accept our mutual humanity and share the bad as well as the good.

If you want to start, there are some excellent new museums displays emerging. And I can recommend this as an excellent novel that will turn your ideas about a popular period of history (and what might constitute a ‘happy’ ending) on their head: How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang.

I’ve often considered past lifestyles through the filter of the essential requirements of life. Food, heat, shelter – things like this remind me that we are not that different from the people of the past, we just have different ways of fulfilling our needs.

All of these elements relate strongly to material culture. They leave a direct trace that is usually discernible by archaeologists. While our present circumstances have very real archaeological potential (a layer of facemasks?), some aspects of coronavirus are less visible. I do wonder how our present days will be marked in the future archaeological record. Living, on and off, under lockdown for the past year has made me consider less tangible human needs and wonder how universal they are and how they might manifest in the archaeological record.

Firstly, the need to socialise. It occurs to me that this is more or less universal, not least because of the way in which many societies use restrictions to the ability to socialise as a punishment or taboo. We are lucky because by and large we can keep in touch with friends and family remotely, using one of the many online platforms available to us. But, it is not quite the same as physical contact, and I long for the time when I can meet up with folk without thinking of the consequences, or the weather. In the archaeological record socialising is curiously obvious and invisible. Some sites, such as aggregation sites, suggest gatherings: assemblies; markets; communal kill sites, all have been postulated using archaeological evidence, sometimes mixed with documentary research. There are drinking vessels, feasting cauldrons, communal structures, and ceremonial monuments; all of which have been interpreted as indicating a role for social contact of various forms. Other elements of social activity: the chit chat of a couple of friends; the gossipy circle of a group of mates; family conversations inside the house, these are much more difficult to evidence – though, by and large, we assume they took place.

Secondly, the need to move around. While travel, per se, tends to be equated with money and leisure in modern society, I think we can argue for a basic inbuilt need for some degree of mobility. There are, of course, examples of families that have never left their valley, or individuals who live a couple of streets from the house of their birth­ – but these are the exceptions rather than the norm. We know of them because they are unusual. We take a level of mobility for granted, whether that is the right to travel for leisure, to visit family, to shop, to work, or to holiday. Archaeologically, there is, in more recent times, a suite of material culture devoted to mobility. Earlier periods have their own studies of mobility using different elements of the archaeological record to infer connections. For those of us who have been confined to a restricted geographical area for the past year, it has been a weird sensation, not helped by uncertainty over our return to the patterns of travel that we had come to regard as normal. I have, perhaps, focussed on the apparently intrinsic mobility of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that I study in Mesolithic Scotland rather than recognising the qualities of mobility inherent in all lifestyles. This is something I want to think about some more.

Thirdly, and finally, there is the need to plan ahead. Lockdown has been hard because it has removed our (apparent) control over our future. We do not have the ability to stop (or even control) the virus, nor do we have the information to predict when life will return to normal. We like to plan: a cinema trip; a visit to granny; an afternoon by the sea; a holiday, dates like these punctuate our weekly routine and help us to envisage the passage of time. It is much harder to mark the passing of the days when using the few events left to us: a supermarket delivery; a zoom call; fish and chips; Easter. There is little real differentiation when all take place in the same limited company, in the familiar surroundings of your sitting room. Even the school holidays look like the term-time. There is a certain amount of discombobulation about this, and it is compounded by the way in which we have had to hand responsibility over our lives to others. For the first time ever, it is not possible to provide the data ourselves when filling in the calendar. Allowing this sort of control over ourselves is nerve-wracking. Archaeologically, we can infer forward planning as, for example, in an agricultural society that sets aside a time for harvest, or a hunting group that set out for seasonally related killing grounds. We can investigate ceremonial monuments and suggest a link to future-proofing the success of the community. In more recent periods we can see specific applications of technology that indicate the measurement of hours and days. It is hard to imagine a society that does not look ahead.

Personally, I have been lucky in that the very tangible necessities of food, heat, and shelter have all been assured for me over the last year. Others have not been afforded that luxury as we have seen in arguments regarding the feeding of school-age children, or extension of universal credit benefits. Erosion of the intangible necessities is, however, more widespread and more invidious. It is unlikely that life will ever return to the old familiar, if flawed, routines, and it will, no doubt, be a while before we settle into a new normal. Recovery is unlikely to be universal, and it will, no doubt, reflect considerable inequality within individual societies and around the world. Some have noted how the (very tangible and archaeologically discernible) vaccine is actually offering a (very intangible and archaeologically invisible) concept: hope. Others have noted how introspective we have all become. This, I guess, is my archaeological contribution.

One of the really fun things about my work has been the opportunity to work with artists on reconstructions of the past. Usually, but not always, these have focussed on Mesolithic communities. I’ve been doing it for nearly 40 years, and it has been so interesting trying to bring the world of prehistory to life. I thought it might be interesting to review some of them here. Of course, no reconstruction drawing is ever going to be 100% accurate. They can only ever be used to give an idea of how things might have been.  Nevertheless, in their changing styles and information, they provide a wonderful reflection on how my archaeology has changed over the years.

The first image I worked on was a depiction of the Mesolithic site at Kinloch, Rum, drawn for the Glasgow Herald by Marion O’Neil in January 1985. Kinloch got quite a bit of publicity and went on to inspire several images.

In all of these pictures you can see that people, tasks, and shelters are prominent, though some of the detail is left vague.

In 1994, Alan Braby drew a series of images for a general publication about Mesolithic Scotland. While many pictures focussed on specific aspects of life and details of settlement, others were much more general landscape views. For the first time, I was thinking about the world inhabited by the Mesolithic communities of Scotland.

The Mesolithic site at Fife Ness did not offer evidence of a full-blown shelter. In 1998, Mary Kemp Clarke drew this image to focus on the resources and the suggestion that the site had been occupied in the autumn. The nature of individuals is left for the viewer to discern.

Jump forward to 2006 and Phil Austin completed three images moving from the detailed to a broader landscape view for the Scotland’s First Settlers project which was published as a Scottish Archaeological Internet Report.

In 2012 I was able to work with Dominic Andrews regarding a Mesolithic Panorama for the displays at the Tomb of Eagles Museum in South Ronaldsay. People, while providing considerable action are less prominent and the overall focus is upon a landscape view, giving a good idea of the world within which the community lived.

In the same year, Brian Lee worked on images for a Historic Environment Scotland guidebook to Orkney for which I was writing text. He somehow captured both close detail and landscape in his series of images of different periods.

Most recently, I have been working with Jan Dunbar to bring to life the different periods of settlement evidenced by the work of Mesolithic Deeside along the River Dee in Aberdeenshire. The detail here is wonderful, though the settlement itself is well hidden within the landscape. The real star is the river as you will see from the main report. The full results are to be published as another Scottish Archaeological Internet Report.

There are so many things I love about these images. You can see how my focus has shifted from the people to the landscape. You can see how our ideas about clothes have evolved (it is interesting to me that we always depict our characters clothed – there is no direct evidence for this and while the inhabitants of many parts of the globe have gone clothed, there are locations where the wearing of complex costumes was seen as disadvantageous, even in cold climates). I’ve always tried not to be too gender specific in task divisions. And you can see so much about ideas of complexity, sophistication and comfort. In many ways the production of a reconstruction drawing is a minefield, but they make us think, and, in my opinion, the worries are well worth the fun!