 So, y dyfodol, rydyn ni'n byw i bwysig y dyfodol o'r fod i'r ddechrau magig yn ysgolwg, sydd ymateb yw'r ddych chi'n ddych chi'n gyffredinol yn 2017. Yn ysgolwg, mae'n cael ei ddweud o'r ddraethau dros o'r proiecthau byroedd, o'r ddweud i'r dynnu ddechrau yn yr wyf, ac yn ddweud o'r ddweud o'r cymdeithasol, ac mae'n ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud, First because they were directed by Mark and there was a big project team including Clark, Antonia and Thomas, Woody, Mastro, and I'm very much presenting on part of everyone today. The focus of this project was mesonetic through to broad-age show talks All of which were brought up by such lovely group violence off the very north tip of Mainland Scotland. Now, we have three principal areas of interest in this project One of them being the origin and significance of stone tools in prehistory, as you might expect. But this aspect in Orkney is actually a very neglected part, a very neglected part of the story. Prehistory in Orkney is largely told through the upstanding monuments. This is partly because we have such a wonderful collection of monuments in Orkney, such as tombs, such as Wyden Hill that you can go inside, monuments such as Ring of Brodgar there, a fantastic monument complex, and also settlements such as Scarabrae where the buildings are still preserved and rewpite, because of the stone art, texture, you still have a significant amount of bed boxes and they're like surviving. So we found that even stone tools such as the beautiful mates here, actually they never feed into these grand narratives of prehistory in Orkney, so we really wanted to redress that balance. Our second area of interest was looking at object biographies and the afterlise projects. And we really wanted to both explore individual objects in a great deal of detail, such as this beautiful man's head at the bottom here, which is made of Lewisian knives, comes from the very north-west of Scotland, possibly the heath of these cailings all in the Neolithic, probably buried actually in the Bronze Age. And other examples such as this cache of artifacts here, again, more Neolithic artifacts, axes, knives, all gathered together, and again buried against all of the tomb in the Bronze Age that was in a bag tied together with the re-perforated button. But we wanted to follow these biographies through right from the distant past, right away up to their discovery over the last couple of hundred years, and also look at the sort of significance of these objects in here and now, and to really get to this last point, the significance of objects in Orby today, we went out and we interviewed many people who have objects in their collections. I think Becky will be eyeing up that value, because Becky doesn't belong from Orby, but it's in someone's hands in Orby, and so we went out and we looked at various collections of objects that people had in their homes on their mantel pieces and asked them what they meant to them. Now, the third area of interest is obviously the history of collecting. It's very much obviously allied to the last topic, and we really wanted to look at the history of collecting, both from a perspective of individuals involved in it, institutions, we wanted to explore the different motivations for collecting in Orby, and then look at these wider relationships and networks that developed over time. So the main outcome of our project was actually a web resource, so I'm going to plug it in here. All these are tools for all the WK, and as you might expect, this has lots of pages devoted to individual arts facts, such as Battleaxes here, other pages devoted to tool technology, raw materials, archaeological sites, and pages with the biographies and collectors telling the stories of their collections. Throughout the site, there's quite a lot of new bedded 3D content, so a lot of high-resolution images in that as well. But today I'm going to talk about the exhibition that came out of the project and was featured across three venues in Orby in the summer of 2017. Now, for those of you wondering where the title of my talk comes from, Conversations of Magic Stones, is a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth, a sculpture on the left here. The reason for us choosing this title was because our first venue, the Pier Art Centre, which is a contemporary art gallery in Strum Ness, has a very large collection of Hepworth material, and Hepworth was very much inspired by the forms of prehistoric objects. You can just see within this sculpture at the bottom two forms of Orby, which was recently a recent acquisition by the Pier Art Centre. It's got a very striking resonance with the place heads and other orcadian tools. So we brought together both a collection of artefacts from her Wakefield archive, and these are stone tools which she held in her personal collection to inform performance sculptures, including arrowheads, axes, weights, obsidian cores and so on. We brought a collection of her tools up as well to display alongside these objects. Within that space, we also put a number of prehistoric objects, such as very mundane objects, such as this hammer stone and anvil. It's a very boring, mundane, everyday functional tool, but putting it in a gallery setting, obviously, it very much plays in an aesthetic in a different way. Now, our second venue, the Orkney Museum, and I apologise for this, I realise that I've only taken the 360 camera to the event, so I didn't actually have any good normal first. So the technology failed. This venue, we continued the theme of having an artistic response to our project. We had full mushroom throughout the project. We supplied full with archive images of objects, new images of artifacts, text, documents and the like, and these are some of the reflections we have on this exhibit that we've sent in. But the exhibition itself in the Orkney Museum, we focused on telling some of those longer term biographies of artifacts, and also the history of collecting, selecting specific collectors right way through the 19th and 20th century to tell that story in Orkney. What we really wanted to do with this was to pull out those different reasons that people collected prehistoric stones all in Orkney. We've got these sort of what we call the established collectors here, like George Petrie on the left, James All's cursor on the right. Collectors who collected very widely, very extensively, they amassed very large collections of material, and they were part of these very wide networks they were in contact with Sir John Evans, they were in contact with Sir John Lover. Their artifacts were feeding into these larger narratives of prehistory during the late Victorian period, and eventually they were positive with very large museums of Orkney. But there were many other forms of collecting in Orkney, and many other reasons for collecting. And we came across dozens of small collections of objects, and these were objects which were related very much to a sort of a quiet commitment to one place, one bit of land. This very big collection of stones here is all from a couple of fields in Orkney on the farm of Thomas and John Leithlake, a father and son who collected these over the 30s and 70s. That's the first mesolithic microlink from Orkney identified in the 1930s. So these were feeding into bigger narratives, but these objects didn't go into the museum. They passed down through the family, and they still keep them. Their objects are connected to a time, they're connected to a place, and they're very much, they gave new stories since they were first picked up. Now a third venue, we were, a strongness museum, we were looking at objects that Washington taught me in the more recent past. So these were all prehistoric objects, but they're not Orkneyian prehistoric objects. Although if you look at them, this arrowhead on the bottom here, says strongness Orkney 1931, the other one Orkney 1900. But these are North American arrowheads, and we found dozens of these in collections across Orkney, and a lovely one from there which was said, where the haystack used to be that was found in a farm in Stanley, it was again amongst the lovely collection of Orkney materials. But these arrowheads actually, they're about Orkney's sort of recent past. And throughout the last 200 years, Orkney's connections to the wider world as a sort of major seafaring community, particularly in strongness, the connections to Hudson Bay Company. So there was a lot of these objects coming backwards and forwards from those places, and entering the record. The other artifacts we saw an awful lot of were actually Maori toky, and these again, have entered Orkney via the whaling ships and the whirling pleats that left strongness. But virtually all of these had gained new prominences. In fact, in Orkney Museum until two years ago, there was one on display that was dug up in a farm in Randall. Just kind of been there very long. But the stories that came with them were quite incredible, and when we were speaking to people, we were realising that they still had incredible resonance. These two axes, this is how they were presented to us. This is a sweet box lined with flowers. And they're objects that are, by the point we're saying here, they were found in Uncle William's toolbox. They have a story about being connected to being found in Hasden airfield near Kirkwall in Orkney. And they passed through several hands. And we realised that these are actually objects which are very much about memory. The significance is through memories, different people, connections to different people and connections to places. But they're objects about forgetting as well. They have these forgotten histories of their original histories on more distant shores. Although they're objects also about remembering and remembering parts. So, that's all right. I'm running very ahead of time. So, my last slide. So, you know, you're trying to pull together some more concluding thoughts on this. I've been talking very much about the significance of stone tools in the present. And some of the stories we told about objects in Orkney were incredibly personal and they resonated through these objects. What we felt through our exhibitions is that by presenting past and present significance in parallel that you could create a real resonance between past and contemporary societies and in a way that you could, you know, get people to engage with that material through expressing it in that way. And you had a real opportunity here to emotionally engage between objects, people and places. And that's something that obviously we can project into the past as well. It's something we often forget about the significance of the biographies which are embedded in those objects that are really important to the environment. So, yeah, to sum up, it's sort of a stone artifact in particular, a very versatile biographies, a fragile, that can be lost and forgotten, but also be invented. And that's where so much of the significance is embedded in. Thank you.