A week of Archaeological Fieldwork

This past week has been very interesting. All week AOC Archaeological Group have been in Caithness working in tandem with Castlehill Heritage Group to educate the community about the Bronze Age Landscape in Caithness. The week began with a classroom session at Castlehill on LIDAR, and how to use the data to spot potential sites of interest. Then from Tuesday onwards we were out in the field, inspecting the sites identified from the LIDAR data. It was fine to get tramping around areas of the county I'm not to familiar with. The weather wasn't ideal, but I did manage to get some drone flights in to get aerial shots of some of the sites. The image below shows 2 Bronze Age Hut Circles, each about 12m in diameter. These Hut Circles are the precursor to Brochs. Learning how to identify these sites was very interesting. Through the use of Maps, Google earth and LIDAR there are a plethora of tools to assist, including the use of iPads in the field. The areas we investigated had an abundance of Hut Circles, Cairns and some potential burnt mounds as well. These are areas which have been setlled for a long long time. In one field we had evidence of habitation from Neolithic right through to Post Medival times. I am still in possession of the LIDAR data for the Baillie Windfarm area, so will be out and about myself and with Iain Maclean conducting investigations to try and document other unrecorded sites, armed with new found knowledge and understanding.