Climatic Variability and 'Marginal' Settlement in Upland British Landscapes: A Re-Evaluation

Blanket peat in the Scottish Highlands: timing, cause, spread and the myth of environmental determinism

“…The hills and moors were a 'desert' in the sense that there is seemingly nothing there for human beings. This view has been enormously inXuential, and has become central to how we saw human ecology in the highlands (Smout 2000;Tipping 2002). Fraser Darling encouraged a view that blanket peat is hostile to our way of life, made us think, indeed, that nature was intimidating, unforgiving and threatening to human settlement.…”

“…Later prehistoric upland settlement took place in spite of the many contemporary disadvantages and hardships to farmers. This interpretation requires a new paradigm whereby we replace the image of a once benign landscape turned hostile with that of an enduringly harsh environment but one in which people could and very successfully did carve out a place for themselves (Tipping 2002 …”

“…There is no evidence from these analyses that peat should be seen as a product, however unintentional, of anthropogenic activities. When early farming communities settled in the uplands, probably from the later Neolithic period (McCullagh and Tipping 1998;Richmond 1999;Tipping 2002;, the uplands were already blanketed in peat in much the way we see them today. Soils had already become extensively acidiWed and paludiWed.…”

Response to late Bronze Age climate change of farming communities in north east Scotland

“…Because temperature change is most often assumed the critical climatic variable in determining landuse, and because temperature decreases with increasing altitude, it is reasonable to expect that upland farming was most susceptible to climatic stress: most workers have sought such human responses to stress in an altitudinal 'retreat from the margins' (Parry, 1978(Parry, , 1981Burgess, 1985;RCAHMS, 1993RCAHMS, , 1997Cowley, 1998). Tipping (2002) collated data on prehistoric land-uses from 14 C dated pollen diagrams in upland regions throughout Scotland, and concluded that there is no consistent evidence from this source for abandonment of upland areas during the Bronze Age-Iron Age boundary. Some well studied regions, such as the northern Cheviot Hills and west Glen Affric (Fig.…”

“…The Dartmoor reaves in southern Britain are also argued to have been abandoned in this period (Fleming, 1988;Parker-Pearson, 1993). It is difficult to establish settlement abandonment from archaeological data because data sets tend not to be continuous and because local change need not be expressive of regional change (Tipping, 2002), although archaeological evidence has been used to contest Burgess' reconstructions (Gates, 1983;Young and Simmonds, 1995;Tipping, 1997;Young, 2000). McCullagh and Tipping (1998) concluded that the abandonment of one excavated settlement in the Achany Glen ( Fig.…”