Pricing Change
New pricing for orders of material from this site will come into place shortly. Charges for supply of digital images, digitisation on demand, prints and licensing will be altered.
1993 RCAHMS Special Surveys
Date 1993
Event ID 1112436
Category Project
Type Project
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1112436
Two projects have been carried out in this programme, the first during May dealing with the Neolithic flint mines in the Den of Boddam, in Buchan, and the second during September with the agricultural and lead-mining landscape around Loch Finlaggan on Islay. Both projects were carried out in support of programmes of excavation and fieldwork mounted by the National Museum of Scotland.
The survey at Boddam (RCAHMS 1994, figs.) revealed a remarkable survival in this intensively exploited landscape, with evidence of extraction pits extending down both sides of the Den. NAS not only mapped with EDM the full extent of the surviving pits (450 pits over about 8ha), but also recorded a small sample in detail on the slopes below the excavations. The detailed 1:500 plan clearly shows sequences of overlapping spoil dumps, suggesting that the earliest of the visible remains are lowest down the slope. However, this simple interpretation probably reflects no more than the latest phase of extraction, and Alan Saville’s excavations have revealed a far more complex pattern of intersecting pits hidden beneath the spoil. The survey also provided the opportunity to experiment with the contouring and topographical modelling facility offered by our survey equipment and software. The results are illustrated here by a three-dimensional image of the topography of the Den, and show some of the potential that this sort of technology provides.
Reconnaissance in the surrounding area also led to the identification of two unrecorded promontory forts on the coast south of Peterhead (Dundonnie NK14SW 65 and Blockie Head NK13NW 6).
The Loch Finlaggan project also reflects the potential that modern survey equipment now affords us. It has provided the opportunity to survey a large area (5.4km2) of landscape around the loch in a way which simply was not available when the Inventory covering Islay was prepared in the late 1970's. Most of the field banks and cultivation remains that were recorded are probably of relatively late date, interwoven with the evidence of 18th- and 19th-century lead extraction, but the environmental evidence recovered from the loch in the course of David Caldwell's excavations should allow them to be set in a wider context. The excavations have been exploring the history of the occupation of an island at the north-east end of the loch, which was a seat of the Lords of the Isles (see RCAHMS Inventory of Argyll, 5, 275-81,No.404).
RCAHMS Annual Report 1993-4, p.14-15; DES 1993, 116-7
