Excavating the Highlands

For this third section of my Scottish travels on behalf of Current Archaeology, I head north and west – up and across into the Highlands. As noted previously, these columns on Scotland are dedicated to the memory of Katharine MacDonald (1976-2022), an old friend, outstanding archaeologist, and proud Scotswoman, who had a particular love of the Highlands and Islands. Indeed, to many, this part of the country is the ‘definitive’ Scottish landscape of their dreams, the stuff of countless movies and TV shows. To less romantically inclined archaeologists, it is a place forged by, on one hand, the environmental extremes experienced there and, on the other, by people’s responses to those extremes.

Peninsular principles

I will begin with a multi-period project that perfectly reflects the research interests of Scottish archaeology noted above, and another common feature of this place and time: community-led projects of the best type. CA 360 (March 2020) reported from the peninsula just north of Inverness known as the Black Isle. There, the Tarradale Through Time Project, which began in 2017, was in the process of concluding its main phase of fieldwork, having surveyed 750ha of the western end of the Isle through a community project involving multiple partners. Ten thousand years of history were uncovered, from the Mesolithic to the post-medieval; the work was undertaken by a diverse array of people, from volunteers to paid specialists from universities and commercial archaeology; and a range of techniques was deployed, from fieldwalking to radiocarbon dating. All in all, it was precisely the kind of project that Current Archaeology likes to champion, and rightly so. (I, for one, look forward to hearing news of the project’s post-excavation analyses in due course.)

Another multi-period, multi-disciplinary research project comes from the western side of the Highlands, the Ardnamurchan Peninsula, which includes the westernmost point of mainland Britain. Most famously, the Viking ship burial found there featured in CA 263 and 272 (February and November 2012) – as well as widely in the popular press – and reappeared in CA 280 (July 2013) in the wider context of the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project, which uncovered a wealth of archaeological remains dating from the Neolithic to the 19th century. Again, this was interdisciplinary research of the best type, with project partners – ranging from the voluntary, academic, and commercial communities – examining long-term patterns of social change and continuity in a single landscape.