The lost lochs of Scotland: tracking land-use change and its effects on the archaeological record

Abstract

This paper examines how loch drainage in 18 th and 19 th century Scotland has shaped the archaeological record, with particular reference to lake dwellings known as 'crannogs'. The analysis uses the Roy Military Survey of Scotland (1747-55) as a base-line for charting changes to lacustrine environment through time. The work is unique for its scale which examines all of mainland Scotland, and the results have revealed unrecognised patterns in the timing and intensity of land-use changes that have impacted lacustrine environments. These patterns are linked to the development of archaeological investigation in Scotland demonstrating that the current distribution of crannogs across the country is an artefact of loch drainage and antiquarian investigation and not representative of the past distribution of these critical sites. This paper presents one way in which we can begin to account for these historic changes to land-use and their impact to our understanding of the archaeological record.

A new chronology for crannogs in north-east Scotland

“…Recent work testing the distribution of crannogs across the country has shown that crannogs were more widespread in north-east Scotland than previously considered, with 33 possible sites now identified in the modern council areas of Aberdeenshire, Aberdeen City, Angus, Moray and Fife (a near three-fold increase on previous counts), though most have been impacted by drainage (Stratigos 2016a(Stratigos , 2016b(Stratigos , 2017) (Illus 1). The new investigation of crannogs in north-east Scotland reported on here responded to calls for greater sampling of sites to build chronologies with the aim of constructing frameworks that assessed the adoption and use of crannogs across Scotland (Dixon 2004: 176-7;Dixon et al 2007: 683;Crone 2012: 164-5), but with this greater presence of crannogs in the study area in mind.…”

“…The presence of artificial island dwellings, or 'crannogs', in Scotland has been recognised since the 18th century, and were the target of antiquarian investigation from the mid-19th century (Stuart 1866;Munro 1882;Blundell 1909). North-east Scotland saw early work on crannogs (Burnett 1851;Grigor 1863;Stuart 1874), but since then there has been relatively little interest in crannogs of this region until recently (Stratigos & Noble 2014;Stratigos 2016aStratigos , 2016bStratigos , 2017. Modern investigations of crannogs in Scotland have tended to focus on regions where there was a more robust and established track record of antiquarian researchlike south-west Scotland (Barber & Crone 1993;Henderson et al 2006;Cavers et al 2011) -or where there were more numerous extant submerged siteslike Loch Awe (McArdle et al 1973) and Loch Tay (Dixon 1981).…”