Archaeological signatures of landscape and settlement change on the Isle of Harris

Between 2004 and 2011, a programme of archaeological investigation by the University of Birmingham on the Isle of Harris, a distinctive island forming part of the Western Isles of Scotland, has allowed the archaeological remains of this enigmatic place to be further characterised and understood. Despite intensive archaeological interest in the archipelago for a number of decades, the Isle of Harris has been overlooked and only now are we beginning to identify the archaeological resource and make comparisons to the wealth of published data from islands such as the Uists, Barra and Lewis. This paper highlights some generic overall patterns of archaeological signatures on the Isle which has been identified through a range of archaeological methods including field walking, intrusive excavation, aerial reconnaissance, geophysical and topographical survey, and documentary research. Several key case studies will be introduced including upland shieling complexes and mulitperiod settlement sites on the west coast machair systems. The purpose of the paper is not to present a gazetteer of the results of the work to date, but to highlight some of the key findings with a view to demonstrating that the Isle of Harris is directly comparable with the archaeologically rich landscapes of the other islands

An excavation at the church of the Blackfriars, Stirling

Part of what was suspected to be the south wall of the Blackfriars Church, destroyed in June 1559, was revealed in 1904 during the construction of the present No 64 Murray Place in Stirling. Permission was given by the present owners of the property to excavate in the garden behind the tenement to see if further traces could be found. By following mortar deposits and stone fragments the outline of a further 13.5m of robbed out south wall, an apparently semicircular apsidal eastern wall and part of the north wall were traced. The total known length of the church is therefore 27.5m, and the internal width 6.5m, with walls 1.5m thick. The greater part of a female skeleton was found just outside the south wall, accompanied by some bones of two infants, and several hundred widely scattered bone fragments. Some pottery was also found, of various dates back to about the thirteenth century

Globalization and the spread of capitalism: material resonances

The intertwined processes of globalization and capitalism are fundamentally material in expression and are central to understandings of the modern world (however defined). Over the last 50 years, post-medieval archaeologists have engaged directly with the materiality of these broad-scale processes, initially from the standpoint of empirically driven descriptive studies and latterly with more interpretative approaches which challenge and stretch disciplinary boundaries. As later historical archaeology is increasingly characterized by a theoretically and geographically diverse set of practices, insights into the material resonances of globalization and capitalism have become increasingly sophisticated and more broadly relevant to the present day