 So at this time when museums and the archives are reaching capacity and heritage sector in the UK and also throughout Europe are looking at way of prioritising funds from archaeological excavation for retention and disposal, I think that it's important to consider those projects which are making the most out of the archive to produce new methods of analysis and also to enhance our understanding of the past. And as the Archaeological Science Manager, HES, I have a particular interest in those projects that are making use of science, that have a science focus and utilise the material that is often the first to be considered for disposal, that I quite liked what you were talking about earlier. So before giving a couple of examples of projects, I wanted to start off by getting the background of some of the strategies, procedures and legislation which guides how archaeological assemblages in Scotland are reported and how they're allocated to museums and then how they're used in research. I feel that if we're to reflect on the future and what we do, we really need to fully understand the current challenges in each of the countries. There's a lot of similarities, so that makes it a lot easier, but hopefully I'll help it, we can be more collaborative in the overcoming these. So the first is Scotland's Archaeology Strategy. It should be noted that this is a strategy for the whole of the archaeology sector in Scotland, it's not, it doesn't belong to Historic Environment Scotland. Museums and archives form a big part of this and it's developed and we actually looked to the overarching Museum Together Scotland Research Strategies and as well as other government ones. The vision, so what we want from the strategy is a Scotland where archaeology is for everyone, that Scotland is a place where the study of the past offers opportunities for us now and in the future to discover, care for, protect and enjoy our rich and diverse heritage. What it does is it focuses on five key aims, so the first one is Delivery and Archaeology which aims to broaden and deepen the impact and public benefit of archaeology within and beyond Scotland, so it's putting Scotland into an international context. Aim two is Enhancing Understanding which aims to increase knowledge and understanding interpretation of the past and that's where our research framework sits. Aim three, which is an important one here and I'm going to come back to it, this aims to ensure that the management of material evidence for the human past is cared for by society and managed sustainably for present and future generations. This is how and this is in this area where we are engaging with museums the most. Aim four, Encouraging Graser Engagement, aims to enable and encourage engagement with our past through creative and collaborative working, active involvement, learning for all ages and enhanced archaeological presentation. And aim five, which I'm also going to come back to very very briefly, aims to ensure that people, so everybody has the opportunities to acquire and use archaeological skills that they need or desire and those skills provide the underpinning for innovation and the understanding, interrogation and learning and also funding of archaeology. Now, if you want any more have a look at the strategy, there's lots of examples of projects, some of which are utilizing archives and things like that. Okay, so just to come back very briefly to aim three, as I mentioned the museums sector are quite key within this and one of the main points made within the delivery plan and I'll put it all up there but you can get it online, is to increase access to collections to allow for learning, research, creativity and also participation. This one's been a bit slow to start but we just recently had a workshop which was led by the National Museums of Scotland in association with Museum Gallery Scotland, so they go for arching bodies. We're really identified a number of challenges in the future of museums including capacity, so that's storage staff, we have an increasing number of archaeology collections that are looked after by non-archaeology curators. That in itself isn't an issue but what is an issue is if they don't have access to the right information to be able to make the most of their collections. Another thing retention disposal came up and also our traditional process which I'll explain in a minute and you'll see that we're slightly behind England from the first one and so we're just going to let England make all the huge mistakes that cost them lots of money and then we won't meet them. I think we've got very different systems as you'll see so we just have to do what we're doing individually and we're actually learning huge amounts from all the work that's going on. So innovation and skills, this one touches upon archives with a particular focus on science, so science and innovation in science is one of the things that we're concentrating on for the next 10 years and what this aim does is it focuses on collaboration between different parts of the sector in order to share information and form creative projects and what it does is it emphasizes the utilization of archives for educational workshops and we've been running a lot of science workshops and we will continue to do that and also prioritizing unpublished assemblies when we're talking to students. So we have five science PhD students that we're currently funding and several of them have access to older excavations and older archives where this struggle is where that information has been thrown out because somebody hasn't quite understood so a lot of what was said earlier really does work true for me as well. So Treasure Trove Scotland, this is a system in which excavated assemblages and transfines are reported to and allocated to museums and we don't have the Treasure Act in 1996 in Scotland. Instead we have the Scots law really and all finds in Scotland actually become property of crime. This law extends to all types of object so not just precious metals and it can be anything like stone and pottery as long as it's not modern. I didn't want to change the side while you've taken a photo sorry. So is the role of Treasure Trove to ensure that all these objects are protected for national benefit and it's the Treasure Trove unit who's responsible for the daily running of the system. Now our Treasure Trove unit is two people in the cup of the whole of Scotland so you can see why we're flagging up looking at and looking at how we do that. So after the artifacts are reported to Treasure Trove it's the Scottish finds allocation panel who meet. It comprises archaeologists and artifact specialists and museum specialists and they decide to which museum the assemblage will be allocated. Now museums are told in advance, accredited museums are told in advance and they can fit into the material. However these are my big fog bears. There are several caskeries of material which are not included and human remains. So in England there's a revered policy. We don't have one in Scotland so human remains are not routinely revered after excavation because human remains can't be owned by anybody and it means that they can't be put through Treasure Trove process. Usually what happens is the finds any finds associated to a human remains will go through the Treasure Trove process and then the human remains will go with the finds when the finds are allocated. That causes us problems when we have human remains found in isolation. So we have a bigger road in coastlines in Scotland and if we have big up a dead person and they've got no finds then technically that person has no home so we're having to deal with that. What we do have is the treatment of human remains policy which is used as the guideline for them and my bug there that anybody knows me has to sit and listen to me rant about this is environmental human remains. Also not covered by Treasure Trove. There's a massive increase in the last 10 years of the amounts of samples because people are a bit scared and they just kind of sampled everything and so we have a huge number of unprocessed soil samples that are finding their way into museum archives and unfortunately that tends to be the first thing that people tend to throw away. They're just like why have I got a tonne of soil in my store and they get thrown away and that's actually one of the issues for one of the PhDs that I supervise. She doesn't have access to that material anymore because it's been thrown away. There's no national best practice guidance for these at the moment. I'm starting that process of writing those so if anybody's got any ideas I would be all ears. So just to give you a couple of examples before I finish up. Die to the Dark Ages PhD by the fantastic Ursula Cesare at the University of Aberdeen. I don't know if anybody heard her talk yesterday but she's fab. What she's doing is using human remains from archives and museums throughout Scotland to reconstruct diet in individuals from the late Iron Age through to the medieval period. Her main questions are looking at the differences between diet in urban and rural settlement during a time of significant urbanization so big changes going on in Scotland. To ensure that her study is truly representative she's needed to access huge numbers of individuals all throughout Scotland and as well as more recent excavations. If we had a reburial policy she wouldn't have that material there. So that's something I always worry that we're just going to throw out all the soil samples and just reburial the humans. What I'm trying to show is that it's not as easy as that. What she is doing is using methodologies that were not available and not even that refined even 10 or 15 years ago and so access to that collection is key in order to make her study useful representative and also fairly innovative. And I've been a bit naughty because this is my project. I worked on this project before I worked for HGS but it is another HGS funded project. What it's doing is it's bringing into publication 1950s excavation of an Iron Age wheelhouse in the Western Isles when they were building a rocket range in the area. The site was excavated as part of one of the largest rescue excavations that went on in Scotland and about six weeks they surveyed and excavated over 30 sites to throw out the US. Very little surviving archive. This is probably it. We have this here and that's when we realised we had more than one wheelhouse which we didn't know we had but what you can see as well is it was very complex. We had quite a lot of stratigraphy in there as well. And it was in this project that the survival of the soil samples from 1952 and the fauna remains so that your unworked animal bone that was key in unlocking the stratigraphy of the site for us. What we did was we knew when the finds were dug up because they were very meticulous in writing this and we also knew how they dug in the grid squares so what we did was we created a Harris matrix of the finds and then dated through those as much as we can in order to create a stratigraphy. Because we knew when things were dated we assumed that it must either be at the same level or the level above in our matrix and we fed those into a Bayesian model and it worked surprisingly we didn't expect it to. And what it showed us was the starting end of occupation but also multiple phases and what appears to now be quite a large Iron Age village which is stuck under the Mecula airport. So why that's significant is that these types of structures are often published on the road in isolation. I have a single wheelhouse and what we're now starting to do is to look at community which is part of new kind of theoretical ways of interpreting and we actually don't have that many wheelhouses dated in Scotland either. There's really few. Kate McDonald did a PhD a few years ago and had to give up with wheelhouses because we just don't have it. So even though it was in 1952 and there wasn't a lot of information we're getting a huge amount out of it now. We're working with the local people in Benbecula in order to link pre-start community with current community which is working really well and if we didn't have those remains they'd be thrown out because we date to 1952 we wouldn't do that. So just to opportunities and challenges I think there's quite a lot of opportunities. We're continually developing new methodologies for the way that we interpret results, how we analyze material. We also have new techniques hacking all the time. I was in the sedimentary DNA session and they were getting sedimentary DNA out of 10 year old samples that have been stored at room temperature so every day so yeah we need to see things up every day we're getting new things happening. Interpretation within new theoretical frameworks that have been published in 1952 we wouldn't have had that community aspect we wouldn't have been discussing that with the local communities now and so again we need that in consideration and we really are getting a much more enhanced understanding of our past. For the challenges I think our biggest challenge is how we loop how we prevent the loss of information it's not simple there's no one size will fit all for any of this and I'm sure we will make mistakes as we go on that journey. So what we need to do is to think about the projects that already exist and what they're doing and where new innovation is coming around especially in archaeological science because I think that's really important. I mentioned best practice guidelines but we're quite good in Scotland at being quite connected and trying to do the same thing we have a single national strategy and we have a single region a single framework for for research and when we're doing individual ones to the region so I'm definitely going to do something to work on and promoting access if people don't know they're there how are they going to go and look at the staff so you mentioned earlier Duncan about having a time limit well it won't work if nobody knows the staff's there so we really need to think about promoting access at HHS we're really lucky because we actually have a national archive and for paper digital that doesn't tend to go with the funds so and you can get it online can more if you want to have a look it's spectacular and the good thing about that is I can help with that because it's part of the same organization so you can be quite connected in that um just to let you know that I'm not just here stopping we put our money where our math is so this is our archaeology program where we look at and where we fund archaeological projects and everything that I've mentioned is everything that we're taken into consideration when we look at projects especially archive projects especially looking at finds the spoils and retention and the how we deal with the archive of itself every I like you mentioned um seeing archival is the end of the of the project and for us that wasn't always the way that we thought the publication was said to be the end and now we've got um archives floating around that we're now having to track down and get them out we're not paid for one where somebody had the excavator died years and years ago and so I think that that is another key thing is making sure the end of the process is the archiving we can't see it as any other um we also need to look beyond the shiny golden treasure um and I would go and look at like soil samples but filling anybody else's so and I think we need to take into consideration the eco effects when we have these conversations about retention and disposal so thank you very much for putting out with my voice