Publication Announcement: Wicked Wild Wastes?

We’re excited to announce the latest project publication (Open Access), coming off the back of my PhD research into repopulating in upland landscapes, aerial and walkover surveys on Rannoch Moor, and inspired by the creative approaches of my colleagues:

Wicked Wild Wastes? Challenging Wildness through Repopulating Approaches to Archaeological Narratives in Scottish Highland Landscapes

You can find this article in a special issue of Scottish Historical Review, based on the 2024 ‘Scotland’s Environmental Histories: Mapping a way forward‘ Conference in Stirling. In this issue you’ll find an array of articles of interest including Ian MacLellan’s exciting work on the Campbell of Glenorchy hunting forests which overlaps with this articles area of interest.

In my article I explore the need for archaeologists and historians to take responsibility for the narratives we produce about life in marginalised landscapes, and the potential for our work to be co-opted to support contemporary marginalisation. I set out the development and transformation of notions of wilderness as applied to highland landscapes, and using the case study of Rannoch Moor set out to provide an alternative approach to the production of archaeological narratives around these landscapes.

The article was described by Prof Richard Oram of the University of Stirling:

“This excellent paper should be required reading for anyone interested in better understanding past intensity of land-use and its multi-faceted character that changed over millennia of human activity in areas of Scotland currently labelled ‘wild’ (or, misleadingly, ‘wilderness’). Modern apparent emptiness is more often than not a constructed artefact of later 18th- and 19th-cent land-management decisions, turning what had been once busy ‘taskscapes’ exploited for a diversity of resources into de-peopled zones maintained largely for the recreation of a privileged few.”

You can read the article here: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/shr.2025.0721

Or check out a blog post on the key arguments in the Edinburgh University Press blog here: https://euppublishingblog.com/2025/09/04/wicked-wild-wastes/

– Dr Edward Stewart