Category: Fieldwork
Glencoe Field School 2025
We will be back in the field in the summer of 2025 for another season of excavations, surveys and creative practices. Between the 24th June and 8th July we will be back at the settlement of Achnacon, excavating features associated with the pre-clearance township. This season we will have even more opportunities for you to…
Achnambeithach in the Rain
‘Welcome to Glencoe!’ we tell the students, on a brisk day in late October in the blustery remnants of Storm Ashley. The south-westerly gusts hurtle up the glen, funnelling neatly round An t-Sròn so there’s no shelter at all. The horizontal rain pelts our faces, needles into every crack and seam in our clothing, and…
Gaming in the Glen
Among the assemblages recovered from the Summerhouse of MacIain in 2023, two small fragments of a slate board give us tantilising clues into how the MacDonald chiefs and their guests spent their evenings. These slate fragments scratched with a checked pattern tell us that those entertained by the chief in Gleann Leac-na-Muidhe would have played…
Fields, Furrows and Farmsteads
See our Fields, Furrows and Farmsteads news item on the University of Glasgow website, where Edward Stewart and Elizabeth Robertson talk about the exciting finds of our field season last month…
Barriers and Boundaries
Kaitlyn Whitsitt During the 2024 Field School season, the survey team conducted walkover survey covering a great portion of the landscape surrounding the excavation site, neatly contextualising the Achnacon settlement in its environment. Wading through both bog and bog myrtle over these two weeks, two things about Achnacon became increasingly clear: the land usage and…
A week in the life of our Survey and Digital Media Assistants
Having loved participating in the project in 2023, we have been incredibly grateful for the opportunity to return to Glencoe this season! Assisting with survey and digital media, we’ve been happily diving into the exploration of the new excavation sites, surrounding landscape, and community engagement in further depth to 2023. The digital media strand over…
Field School 2024: 18/06/24
Over the past few days we have continued our work in Glencoe exploring the settlement archaeology in this landscape through survey, excavations and creative media. Our excavations, run in partnership with the NTS archaeology team, have continued exploring the settlement of Achnacon. The three structures we are excavating have yielded exciting finds including pottery and…
Field School 2024: 15/06/2024
Today as part of our ‘dig for a day’ event we had a wonderfully busy day with lots of digging and drawing, finds and fun. Today an amazing team of local volunteers joined us on site to excavate test pits across the kailyard in front of structure 3. We are exploring this area to better…
Field School 2024: 14/06/23
Today we continued excavating in structures 1 and 3 which appear to represent stone and turf walled byrehouse structures. Some star finds included a decorated pipe bowl, a green-glazed vessel base, and the rim of a redware bowl with yellow slip decoration. In the afternoon we began planning the collapse within these structures, and photographed…
Field School 2024: 13/06/24
Today was our first day of fieldwork this season and we were busy! With the help of our partners from the NTS Archaeology team and volunteers we deturfed trenches over two of the three structures we will be investigating this season and began the process of cleaning these off to understand what archaeology we might…
