The Scottish islands have played a role in the development of Scottish archaeology that seems disproportionate to the size of the islands. The archaeology of the islands is often considered to exemplify Scottish archaeology much to the annoyance of archaeologists working on the mainland where the archaeology is very different. This is particularly the case with Orkney where the archaeological record is exceptional in many ways and where the history of exploration has been extensive, but the Hebrides have also made a major contribution and one which has perhaps been overlooked. In this paper, I propose to give a brief introduction to the archaeology of the southern Outer Hebrides. The region has had an episodic record of archaeological interventions which includes work by some important figures in the history of Scottish archaeology and it has played a surprisingly significant role in some key archaeological debates and developments such as the nature of brochs, the distribution of chambered cairns, the early development of rescue archaeology, and the problem of unpublished archaeological backlogs.

This paper explores Iron Age landscapes and places in the Outer Hebrides. The Outer Hebrides are a group of islands where the Iron Age is defined chiefly by the distribution of monumental settlement architecture. The research behind this paper was motivated by the observation that experiential or sensory landscape archaeology had been largely neglected within British Iron Age archaeology and in the study of the Outer Hebridean Iron Age more specifically, despite being comparatively well developed in the context of Neolithic and Bronze Age research. Although there are a variety of perspectives on the Outer Hebridean Iron Age within current literature, they all rely upon the premise that this society was structured primarily around differences in monumental domestic architecture. This paper offers an alternative narrative for the Outer Hebridean Iron Age, structured specifically around an understanding of landscape and place. Four principal landscape settings are identified for Iron Age sites: lowland coastal, inland islet, upland, and coastal headland. These places are associated with a range of distinct experiences, and I argue that they provided locales in which dwelling would by necessity have functioned very differently. This paper concludes by examining some of the assumptions previously made about the landscape location of Iron Age sites and in doing so questions some of the dominant interpretations of the Outer Hebridean Iron Age.

This paper revisits the series of disarticulated human remains discovered during the 1980s excavations of the Cnip wheelhouse complex in Lewis. Four fragments of human bone, including two worked cranial fragments, were originally dated to the 1^st centuries BC/AD based on stratigraphic association. Osteoarchaeological reanalysis and AMS dating now provide a broader cultural context for these remains and indicate that at least one adult cranium was brought to the site more than a thousand years after the death of the individual to whom it had belonged.

This paper introduces the initial findings from an ongoing buildings archaeology research project. I present the results of two wide-ranging mortar surveys which describe the archaeological evidence for lime mortars within the 12^th-century bicameral chapels of Atlantic Scotland and pre-Reformation chapels of the Western Isles. The diverse evidence for materials, plan form, and structure suggest important processes of cultural negotiation. I argue that lime mortar was an animated technological agent for Christianization, which enabled power and perspective to be mediated by complex culturally appropriate techniques.

The ecclesiastical landscape of dispersed rural communities in the late Middle Ages consisted both of their parish church and other structures usually referred to as chapels. The laity's main encounters with the Church were meant to occur at the parish church to which they belonged from the cradle to the grave; however, in practice, the laity's allegiances were much more complex. This article discusses with reference to two parishes in the Hebrides how we can identify different chapel types and the implications this has for our understanding of medieval religious devotions. It will seek to demonstrate the breadth and diversity of religious practice in the late medieval Hebrides.

Many thousands of archaeological sites are threatened by coastal erosion around the globe. The problem is particularly grave in Scotland, where a number of management strategies have been developed. Much of this work has been undertaken by Historic Scotland working in partnership with the SCAPE Trust and the University of St Andrews. This paper outlines the scale of the problem presented by coastal erosion, using recent work in the Western Isles to provide examples. It shows how action has developed over the years, with heritage managers often requiring a different approach to other coastal managers. The effectiveness of desk-based assessment and coastal survey is reviewed, and the results of two desk-based assessments in areas that were subsequently surveyed are analyzed. The paper outlines how prioritized lists of sites requiring future action have been produced and describes the important role that community groups can play in heritage management, giving examples of practical projects that include the community excavation of a site threatened with destruction.

This paper provides a preliminary analytical summary of the results of post-excavation work underway on a series of archaeological surveys and excavations on the western coast of the Isle of Lewis, on the machair of Barabhas township. During the excavations, which were carried out on and off between 1976 and 2001, we sampled settlements, ritual sites, and landscape features dating from between the Early Bronze Age and the Norse Period, including a Beaker settlement and a Viking Age or Norse settlement, within an area suffering from severe aeolian erosion. Analyses of the finds yield a picture of the development of the landscape, both ritual and subsistence, over a period of at least 2500 years.

Between 2004 and 2011, a program 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 characterized 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 that have 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.

Although the Western Isles have been subject to a number of recent archaeological investigations, there has been limited recent work on molluscan assemblages, despite the very good degree of preservation to be expected in a number of deposits and the significant work in the 1970s and 1980s on a number of sites such as Northton, Baleshare, and Hornish Point. In the meantime, land snail analysis has flourished in southern England and elsewhere in Europe, with the development of new techniques of numerical analysis such as the taxocene framework, the use of land snail assemblages in climate reconstruction, and recent refinements in amino acid dating. This paper provides a brief summary of the work to date on Hebridean snail assemblages, and presents preliminary results from work in progress, exploring aspects of site-formation processes, middening, land use, and relative dating that can be explored using land snails.

This paper presents the findings from an investigation of organic residues extracted from pottery sherds from Late Iron Age and Norse phases from Bornais, South Uist, and the Late Norse period from Jarlshof on Shetland. These data confirm intensive and/or specialized processing of marine products in pottery on Shetland, either for consumption or other uses, such as rendering of oil from fish livers. In contrast, at Bornais, little increase in the intensity of marine product exploitation can be identified between the residues from the Later Iron Age and Norse phases; however, an emphasis on dairy products is identifiable throughout all phases and pottery types. While the findings from these two sites clearly cannot be extrapolated as entirely representative of the wider respective regions, what emerges is further evidence for diverse economic or cultural patterns at different locations within Scandinavian Scotland.