Community Heritage Development Award will enable Aberdeen researchers in Archaeology, Anthropology, Education, History, and the Library and Historic Collections to work with community collaborators to bring new insights to the historical archaeology of 19th century Aberdeenshire.
Ongoing research at the Colony site, located on the iconic hill of Bennachie in northeast Scotland, is bringing historic and contemporary communities closer together. A collaborative effort between the Bailies of Bennachie, a local community group, and the University of Aberdeen, is helping to shed light on the history of this 19th century farming community; a place locally celebrated as site of tension between its crofter-colonists and neighbouring landlords. The recent award of an AHRC development grant to Dr Jeff Oliver and colleagues at the University of Aberdeen will provide the necessary backing to extend the project into its next phase. The project has two interlinked objectives; the first is related to the history of the colony, while the second is related to the process of undertaking research in the context of community heritage initiatives.
Little is known about community relations among the 'common' people of 19th-century rural Scotland, and what is known tends to play on very generic stereotypes. As the Colony provides a fascinating window on local historical processes, our research will use archaeological and historical methods to go beyond the more clichéd understandings of this period. In this context our goals are to find out about community relationships at the micro-scale of the settlement, focusing in particular on local hierarchies, social relationships, and local ways of thinking and working. The ruins of the settlement will be surveyed, cleared, and subjected to limited archaeological excavation and environmental analysis. Moreover, the findings from the colony will be fully contextualized with comparable settlements in the broader landscape. In addition we will examine related historical records in order to provide complimentary evidence about the local character of life in the Colony and how it compared with settlements beyond.
Significantly, the project also aims to provide insights into the process of creating knowledge about the past, specifically in the context of community heritage initiatives. We will track the means by which knowledge is produced in our archaeological and historical research through participant observation and through structured interviews with a broad range of community members, including school groups. The object will be to learn more about how relationships created through doing heritage research affects the way that knowledge about the past is used in new settings. Ultimately our research seeks to provide inspiration and guidance to allow future projects, including ongoing work at Bennachie, to be more effective in engaging local people and to create a long-term sustainable strategy for community involvement.
Photo: Bailies members, Barry Foster and Ian Ralston, help plan the ruins of ‘Hillside Farm’, on the lower slopes of Bennachie. On-going work at the colony site is providing new insights about the texture of every-day life in rural Aberdeenshire.