 I'm Rebecca Rinal. I'm from the University of the Highlands and Islands, and I'm the project researcher and coordinator for CERF, which has been referred to a couple of times in its original development name as the Three Island framework, and is now Scotland's island archaeology framework. I'm delivering this talk today on behalf of the wider project team, which includes Jane Downs and Julie Gibson, Kevin Murphy and Val Turner. In this really short presentation, I just want to try and make three main points. I really want to just introduce you all to our project, make you aware of it, and hopefully encourage people to be stakeholders. I want to second, I want to convince you, if you need convincing, that islands need to be thought about differently, particularly small island groups, when we think about regional frameworks. Finally, I want to suggest that we would benefit from sharing some of our strategies for island research at a European or perhaps even international level. I'm just going to begin by introducing our project. I'm going to talk a little bit about the multi-scaler island approach that we're developing. Then I'm going to try and identify some island-specific research challenges and opportunities, some of which are specific to Scottish islands and some islands more generally. The project is co-ordinated by the UHI Archaeology Institute in partnership with the local authority archaeologists in Westernau, at the Corleum, Lennon and Shear, Hawking Islands Council, Shetland Community Trust. The project is being supported by Society of Antiquities and the SCARF project, which we've obviously just heard about for now, and previously. The project has also been very generously funded by Historic Environment Scotland as part of Scotland's archaeology strategy. The project just started in July this year, so we're really at the beginnings and still developing our strategy in many ways. I should also point out that it's quite a timely point in which to start an island framework, as you may or may not know, that Scotland's island bill came out in 2017, and there's lots of those things there. The aim of this project is to develop research frameworks for these three regions in the first three years. As you'll see, our structure starts off in the Westernau, Shetland and Orkney, and then in year four we're going to pull together an overarching island archaeology framework, where we'll be looking at all these regions together, but also Scottish Islands more generally. Nicely ties in with the talk. It's just given that we will structure our framework chronologically. We'll be tying it in with the chronological terminologies and framework of SCARF for all of the good reasons that I think have just been given. But we also want to think about a few themes that tie these islands together. The themes that we've got here came out of an open session discussion we had at a conference last year in Orkney, our islands, our past, where everyone contributed to bringing these themes out. So then a little bit about what we're calling our multi-scaler approach. It's kind of evolved out of our discussions about the way in which regional and national frameworks articulate. Obviously SCARF is the starting point, the National Framework, first published in 2012, and then the call made by HES in the Archaeology Strategy in 2015 for regional strategies, which we've responded to. So for us, the next scale down, the regional scale will be this island-wide framework. And sitting within this will be the individual islands, or archipelagos, those individual frameworks. But because we live and work in islands, and we think about islands a lot, at least I do, we see those being at another scale, a scale again, and that's the scale of islands within islands. Just as an example here, I'm going to look at the Western Isles as a little mini case study where we started. The Western Isles includes 15 inhabited islands, but in fact, archaeologically we find evidence for exploitation or habitation of one kind or another from 50 of those islands within the archipelago. We also recognise that there's a tendency amongst researchers to make islands of themselves and their research, and the result can sometimes be isolated narratives for particular islands within these archipelagos, and then gaps, large gaps in between. So one of the many things that we'd like to achieve with this framework is to encourage discussion about this, discussion around the validity of these isolated narratives, and encouraging our stakeholders to think about inter-island research opportunities. The islands I'm thinking of in the Western Isles, if those of you who are familiar with the Western Isles would be places such as St Kilda, Shant's, and even larger islands like Benbecula where, although there's lots of work, they sit isolated out with the broader narratives. Just a really important, very basic point to make, which is that archaeologically across this region we find that some periods there's lots of evidence suggesting links, shared aspects of material culture, etc. Conversely, for other periods we find exactly the opposite, and I just want to emphasise that by considering these reasons together we're not overlooking any of those differences, and in fact it's those dynamics that we're really interested in exploring. We also find that there are different relationships between these island groups and the mainland, and that's another dynamic that's very interesting. So why study these islands together? It's because we want to share experiences, we want to understand the challenges and the opportunities, and we see huge potential for collaborating and learning from one another by doing this. To just look a little bit at some of these challenges, as I've said, some are specific to Scottish Islands, some are island-wide or island-wide issues. For those of you, I think quite a lot of us were actually, I recognise some faces throughout the climate change session yesterday. A lot of these issues were covered in a lot of fascinating detail. But islands are vulnerable environmentally, Scottish Islands in particular, we have issues of increased storminess, sea level rise and coastal erosion are really huge issues for us. So it means that when we identify research priorities, many of them need to be addressed really soon, so that urgency is going to often will have to be a major part of these research agreements. And I just wanted to point out as well that this argument has been really expertly made by the skater trust in their work, looking at coastal eroding sites in Scotland, and I believe that there have been about 12,000 sites in Scotland identified. This has been whittled down to 322 high priority sites, but two thirds of these are in the Northern and Western Isles, and that's really crucial to understand how we're going to be thinking about the spring work. But in addition, islands are also remote places in loads of senses of that word. This has accessibility and resource implications for how we carry out research. But also, there's a further scope for separating the research of cows from people who were carrying out the research and those research outputs. I think this is a real challenge for anyone carrying out research in islands and we need to think about it. On a more positive note, islands offer immense opportunities for research. I don't have time to go into any of these in much detail, but the exceptional preservation conditions is one that is very specific to the Scottish Islands that we're talking about. Relative lack of development means that lots of our deposits remain un-stirred when they would be relatively disturbed in other places. Traditional land management, such as crofting, means that upstanding remains are less affected, but we're also really lucky to have these amazing preservation environments. We've got peat, we've got macka, and these preserve archaeology very well. These things here I've sort of brought together from a variety of sources, but in particular I point people to the article by Scott Fitzpatrick from 2015. The huge potential for modelling for future sustainability is really, really key and something that came up in several sessions that I've been at over this week. But as we all know, archaeological research doesn't just inform us about the past, it obviously informs us about the present and looking into the future. The Scottish Islands, like many of the world's islands, are really vulnerable places socially and economically, as well as environmentally. There are a range of complex reasons for this that we don't have time to go into, but things like population decline, remoteness and environmental change all play a role there. We believe that a framework for archaeological research that looks at Scotland's islands needs to consider these factors that are all recognised at national, European and international level. It's these bodies of work that we'll be referring to in the legislation in order to be mindful of these impacts. One of the interesting things that all of those documents refer to is that they all agree that heritage and culture are key assets for small islands. Perhaps the most obvious example of that would be in sustainable tourism, which you hear would be very familiar to people. It would be the Ring of Brodfir, which is part of the UNESCO World Heritage site. But there are other things as well where culture and heritage are really important to island communities. They contribute to strong sense and a piece of identity in small island communities. Again, coming back to this sustainability issue, archaeological research can provide lessons for building more resilient and sustainable communities in our islands. So, just some very simple concluding thoughts. Islands offer distinct challenges and opportunities for our political research. We seem to be aware of that. The invite is, I think, to think critically about boundaries and scale, and that's actually been a lot of the discussion I think we've had already today competing into that. We have hard boundaries, it seems, on islands, but we need to think about the fluidity as well. Again, archaeological research has the potential to play an important role for islandry generation. Finally, I just wanted to say thank you to people who have contributed to this. Finally, I want to leave you with an invitation. We've only started this project in July, so we haven't got firm dates yet, but we are hoping to have our first big meeting for this framework in the Western Isles in hopefully the first week in December. So, I'd say, please save the date if you want to know anything more about what we're doing, would like to be involved in any way, please get in touch with me. But I'd also be really keen to establish some contacts with other island archaeologists and think about islands a bit more generally if people are willing and interested. Thank you very much.