 Thank you. Well, I hope everybody's partaken of a convivial if solitary conference lunch and welcome back. What we want to do is move ourselves slightly north from the focus of many previous papers. I think for me one of the personal things that I found interesting has been all the talk of new models and resolving of kind of hints of data and things to do with the northern North Sea. And it'll be good to kind of push that back a bit further, particularly for those of us interested in the early people in Scotland. But it's also interesting that obviously we're very much here, driven by the ELF project. A lot of the focus of work has been further south. So what's going on in the north? What's the potential of the north? Well, certainly, even if we're looking at, even if we're talking about earlier coastlines being closer in to the present shore, there is potential in Scotland. Unlike the sort of memories that many of us may have of fantastic pictures of raised beaches in old school geography books and things, much of Scotland is in fact a submerging landscape or perhaps more accurately. It's a very complex picture of both submergence and emergence, as you can see from the isobase model on screen just now. So what's going on here? Why do we hear less about it? Well, yes, I think that it's true to say that it's partly an artifact of research. Perhaps we haven't had the big projects, things like the aggregates levy fund was never really available for work in Scottish waters. Work is ongoing just now and we can perhaps think about two areas in particular. There's been a lot of work done, particularly on the intertidal zone in the west of Scotland, both on western coastlines, right out across the islands, out to the coastline of the Long Island, for example, Lewis Harris down to Barra. But what I want to do, as Helen said, in our paper is I'm going to look at work in the Archipelago of Orkney, which we've been undertaking for several years just now. And here I'm talking about the work of the Rising Tide project, which has been active in Orkney since 2005. And as you can see from the screen, really, we've been crossing the boundary. We've been working both drawing data on land in the intertidal zone and underwater. And we've several published papers now and more kind of lurking in the pipeline. So happy to pass on references and things to people if you're interested in that. The project is really driven by landscape change by the changing shape of the Archipelago in Orkney of Orkney through the period of human settlement here, right from earliest times. And it's a picture of landscape change that's very much driven by changes in relative sea level. It is a slowly submerging landscape. As you can see here, there's extensive areas of submerged landscape. And indeed the very earliest archaeological record is somewhat fragmentary up here. So perhaps for me as an archaeologist, one of the big questions has been how much is the fragmentary nature of the archaeology due to sites being on a now seabed landscape and how much is it related to other things? Obviously, in order to understand the communities who've lived in Orkney in the past, we have to know what the islands look like. And we also have to understand the dynamic landscape within which they lived, the way in which change was a part of their lifestyle. So to start, perhaps one of the first things we did really was try to build a sea level curve for Orkney and you can see here data points. In fact, it seems like a while ago now, but what we found was that sea has only reached present height, roughly present height, around about 4,000, three and a half thousand years ago. And in many ways, this was at the time quite a surprise. As I say, personally, I'm very driven by hunter-gatherers, not interested in more recent people. But it was this thought that we actually had the potential of a more recent archaeological landscape was something that interested us. And if you like, added an extra dimension to the project. And indeed, one of the interesting things about this was the fact that, of course, the hunter-gatherer footprint is notoriously elusive. It's elusive on land, never mind underwater. But when we're talking about some of the more recent archaeology of Orkney, in particular the Neolithic archaeology, the first farmers, we're talking about fantastic stone-built record. And so was there the possibility that we had stone-built monuments, stone-built remains in the underwater landscape? That was something that kind of was added into the mix, excitingly. And that's really, in a way, what I'd like to talk a bit more about now. Well, obviously, Orkney is a very small archipelago. But in fact, what we very quickly realised was that, despite the small size of the archipelago, the sort of generalised models of sea-level change that one might work with, even where you're building your own sea-level curves and things, that these models remain very general when you're trying to talk about the impact of landscape change on a particular community or on the area around a specific site. And so one of the things that we've been working on is trying to take very particular topographic units, if you like, and build more detailed models that are more meaningful in a community sense. So that's one of the things that we've been working on. And here you can see one of our main focuses of interest, the Bay of Firth, and some of the results that have come from work in and around the Bay of Firth. Now, we had several reasons for moving to the Bay of Firth. It's a nice sheltered bay right at the heart of the archipelago. But it's got a very good archaeological record, both around it on the shores around the bay and also on the islands, which you can see in the centre of the bay there. But one of the interesting things about the Bay of Firth is that there's a very strong tradition of oral history relating both to places. There's a lot of stories about people doing things out on areas of land that are now underwater. So those stories of funeral possessions being washed away trying to get out to the island of Damsey. Let me bring up my laser pointer. Yeah, this is the island of Damsey here. And those stories about people crossing over to Damsey and being washed away and things. There's also a strong tradition of divers. It's a rich area for both oysters, scallops, lobsters and things. There's a lot of stories about divers finding sites swimming through arches and into chamber tombs and things. It seemed that this was an area that was worth investigation. And you can see here some of the very detailed models that we've managed to draw up, looking at the way in which the nature of the bay has changed through time. And I think one of the big things about this is that the realisation came that submergence, that inundation wasn't just a process of attrition, but you're also talking about things like, for example, the impact on the intertidal zone. But that's not always a negative as the landscape changes, particularly when you're talking about the hunter gatherers. But in Scotland, we tend to assume that our hunter gatherer communities that many of them are very much coastal specialists. We talk, we teach students about the importance of the intertidal zone. And here we are with a much greater intertidal zone in the past than we actually have in the present. You can see how the reduction in intertidal zone only really takes place as we approach the present day, which was an interesting thing. We can build these models for specific parts of Orkney. We can look at the relationship with existing terrestrial sites. We can begin to think about the potential impacts of inundation on the communities living on these sites. What about the sites underwater? And this is where things have perhaps become a little bit more difficult. I think when we started out, we all had hopes very much of the sort of Danish type landscape. Of course, Orkney is a very, very different place, really known for its high energy waters. So perhaps we were a little naive right from the start. I think many people will be aware of all the marine renewable work going on around Orkney. It's perhaps not the most obvious place to be looking for archaeology. But there are places that what we've found is by targeting more sheltered and specific areas. So that's what we've been working on, but actually populating the submerged landscape with sites, even when we've been doing things like predictive modelling has proved more difficult. And what I want to just talk about in particular today, perhaps slightly less the hunter-gatherer footprint. I think we've been hearing a lot about that out in the North Sea and things, but what's very much come home to us is the issue of stone-built remains. Those elusive, well, they're not elusive if you're on land, it's what's attracted fantastic community of archaeologists to Orkney over the years. And of course, the advantage that one has is that bedrock in Orkney is a fantastic natural building material and people in the past, as indeed today, really take advantage of that. But the problem for us as archaeologists is that that very use of the building material, it means that many of our older remains when you're going back four, five thousand years, that a piece of dry stone walling can begin to blend in with a natural cliff line and it can be quite difficult to tell where one stops and the other begins. Sometimes, even when you're on land, I think you can see here one of the nice, beautifully tidied up and maintained Neolithic tomb sites on the island of Rousey. But you can see the way in which you can have faces of walling and they do begin to mimic bedrock. And then you can kind of imagine, well, if you're underwater, how much more difficult is it going to be? So we had to kind of try and think, OK, and I think other people have taken this approach. We've heard one or two people talking about it. Well, what is left of your, what does it, what do your prehistoric sites comprise? And really just very kind of grossly dividing it into small and large and thinking about smaller scale features. Well, perhaps these are related more to some of the older sites, mesolithic, polylythic sites. You might be talking about discolourations of sediment, post holes, pits, halves, collections of finds, things like that. Moving slightly forward in time, obviously coming into the Neolithic, you're going to get larger scale features, walling, settings, ditches, sort of positive and negative features all added into the mix. But what you've got to do then when you're working with a submerged landscape is to consider, well, what are these sites going to look like underwater? How do they degrade? What materials do they accumulate? You have to look at local issues, the context, wave energy, topography, shelter, things like that. It's a complex picture. Really what it boils down to is, and believe me, there's enough ballast dumps on the seabed of Orkney. When is a pile of stones on the seabed? Just a pile of stones on the seabed, particularly when it's covered by dense growths of seaweed. And we have seaweeds up here that some people get very excited about. So you can't just rip it all off or anything. Nevertheless, we do have stone features on the seabed. The problem has been validating them, if you like, as anthropogenic. And you can see here, again, two very kind of gross divisions, but we have vertical stones and, indeed, occasionally settings of vertical stones. We have horizontal stones. These are nice, particularly clean ones, not covered with seaweed, but I think you can see that it can be very difficult. There's no nice welcoming little historic Scotland markers or collections of skulls or even timbers lying around to suggest that something else might be going on here. And so we have to think a bit more broadly. And in many ways, the technique, the kind of thought processes that we're adopting, they're very similar to the way that you work on land. I mean, essentially, we're looking at the context of the features. We're looking at their position in the landscape, at any patterning we might be able to see. Have we got individual features? Have we got linear arrangements? Things that might not occur naturally, geometric, symmetry, that sort of thing. And moving to a slightly more sort of broader scale, are we getting layered stonework? Are we getting scattered stonework forming patterns? What's the background matrix like? Are we getting stones marking out in a softer sediment? That sort of thing. But of course, the problem that you have is when you're standing on a hillside looking at a pile of stones in the corner of the field, one thing you'll do instinctively is raise your eye and look around you to get the overall context. You might try and step back a bit to see where are other sites and things. If you're underwater and you do that sort of thing here in Orkney anyway, you just lose sight of the feature you're looking at. So it's not always as easy as just eyeballing something. We have to deploy other techniques. And you can just see here some of the sorts of things that we're beginning to come up with. This is an isolated feature just to the north of the island of Damsey in the Bay of Firth that we came up with very early on. It looks really exciting. I think this also brings out another of the issues that we have underwater. I've mentioned the abundant weed growth and things. But I think one of the things that we have to be very aware of is that the eye will interpret things in terms of what it thinks it wants to see, what it thinks you want to see. It's very, very easy to make this out to be something. It would be lovely to see it as some sort of portal or table tomb or something like that. Unfortunately, the reality isn't quite as nice as perhaps that the photograph might lead us to believe. We can have stone settings more perhaps relating to horizontal features, beddings of stones and things. Again, this is in the Bay of Firth, just off the island of Damsey. Very difficult to validate whether this sort of thing is actually anthropogenic or not. There are other features, these little settings you've seen one earlier of vertical stones. There's an area just to the north of Damsey where we've got quite a lot of these. And interestingly in this case, it relates to or they're very close to an early Christian church site, a chapel site, which is eroding into the sea. And we're pretty certain that they probably relate to the lost graveyard from the chapel site. It's one of the few early Christian sites in Orkney that doesn't have a graveyard, even though there are actually plenty of stories relating to people being buried there. Obviously, in this case, it would be a fairly recent inundation probably related to some sort of barrier breach. The island is degrading due to barrier breaches even in the present day. And you can see here similar vertical stones in a graveyard elsewhere in Orkney on the island of Bursey. And then we have more large, we have bigger features. And we've really divided these into two, into topographic features and kind of piles of stone. This is a feature that we found very early on. We've called it the main mound. It's one that's been particularly interesting to us. Obviously a very nice circular shape. Sitting here, you can see in its top graphical context, you can dive down on it. There's some lovely stonework on the top until you remember that of course Orkney stone breaks naturally into these sort of slabs. So we can't ever be 100% certain that they're actually laying. What we can do is look around the whole site, look at the different angles of dip and bedding and things. You can see it's much steeper around the edge. It flattens off in the middle. We can start to get some overall information. We looked at when the site would have been inundated. It's likely to have submerged by around about six and a half thousand years ago. So not an obvious contender for a neolithic site. At the moment, we're tending to think this site is most likely to be natural, but it is very difficult to come up with either natural or anthropogenic explanations for the site. It's something we're still working on. And then for the more the kind of pile of stones, if you like, moving over to the west where we've been working in the lock of Stennis, partly to give context to the World Heritage sites and the site at Nessa Broga, which all lie along the isthmus there. And we've produced a model of, in fact, of the site in the early Neolithic around about the time that the Nessa Broga work there would have been starting. So the point of view of this lecture just that we're interested in a mound site over on the other side of the lock here. You can see it showing up and here with the bathymetry showing up very, very nicely. And in this case, the stonework sits more on top of the bedrock. Again, we're still, sadly, we were going to do some diving on that. It got a bit caught up in COVID and things, so that's still got to be done. But one of the things that's interesting about this site is that it's very similar in size and also in shape to some of the very earliest Neolithic tombs in Orkney, many of which sit down at present day sea level and here you can just see a nice reconstruction, a sketch of our reconstruction of the one on Rousey. And so that's something we're tending to verge to think more towards anthropogenic, although we need to verify that still. So just to sum up, we definitely have sites interpreting them, verifying them, much more difficult. What we've found is that we've got our results by focusing in targeting very specific areas, particularly shallow protected waters, but that has shown us that even in a high energy environment, you can get results that it's not totally devoid of archaeology, if you like. And that really means, of course, that local topography, you really have to understand the local topography. You have to be able to look at things like offshore barriers and so on that these are highly significant in the way in which both inundation will play out and in which survival of sites will play out. We've found in fact that diving we've perhaps done less than we might have done, thought we would do with divers, it's very useful, but it doesn't always provide all the answers and really we've worked in by going through a reconstruction of the landscape. And just because I'm an archaeologist, I kind of like to bring everything back to the people. I think one of the things, well, we have to kind of make sure we're not just running with all our assumptions. We want to constantly question our assumptions. Is this focus on the coast? Is it really there? Is local sea level rise a threat? I think one thing we have to remember is that sea level rise is a big threat to us today because we've lived through centuries, millennia of stability. But for the people who are living in Orkney in early prehistory, sea level rise is just the way of the world. It's the way things were, they didn't know it was going to stop. We've got hindsight, but they didn't. And I think we forget that quite often. So how do they subsume this kind of changing world into their mindset into the way they live, into their scientific knowledge? How does it influence behavior, stories, that sort of thing? I'm just going to leave you with those questions. Absolutely no answers. And just turn to the last slide to thank everybody, to thank you for listening and say that thankfully I've got Rich and Martin here to answer all the difficult questions. Thank you. Thank you very much Caroline. What a fantastic presentation. It's just great to see these, those images of Orkney and the work that you've done so far. Are there any questions from anyone in the chat? I can't see anything in the chat. So I'm just wondering whether there are any questions. We've got a little bit of time before our next speaker. Oh, here we go. We do have one other coming in now. So the first one is from Trevor Faulkner. Oh, they're all coming in now. And they ask, Shetland, or they say Shetland is also in a four bulge area and has been falling relative to sea level in the Holocene, opposite to the inland Scotland mainland. Is submarine archaeology being searched for there? We've done a little bit of work in Shetland around Lowick where there's some nice submerged forest remains and rather nice neolithic acts. But yes, Shetland is very interesting because of course it's even more deeply bedded if you like the submerged landscape than Orkney. As far as I know, and people might know a different work going on, but I don't think there's any submerged landscape work being done there. In fact, when I've been at a couple of seminars in Shetland, awareness wasn't high that there was a submerged landscape. The University had had students searching the present coastline for material relating to things that was rather interesting when you pointed out that the coastline at the time they were interested wouldn't have been at present day height. So it does show in fact going back to in many ways what Geoff has always talked about that we still have to get information out there that submerged landscapes even exist. That's absolutely so important. We have another question from Bjorn Nielsen who asks, what about faunal remains and wood? So far, nothing. I think that's right, is it, Martin? So no faunal remains that have come up in any of our work. There is wood. I mean there's the plank feature, the plank in the Bay of Ireland or the piece of large timber. So there are bits of wood in there. There's peats in the Bay of Firth submerged peats because we've got a series of mesolithic lakes that transform in the late Mesolithic period as sea level rises. So in those situations, yes we've got but not work towards it at the moment. One last question from Peter. Peter, sorry, it keeps moving. Rowley Conway asks, is there any indication that Red Deer or large ungulates were introduced in the Mesolithic? The million dollar question. I think Jackie published a paper on that, didn't she, about the Neolithic? I think when they looked at the Neolithic Red Deer population they're getting, am I right, two strands, one of which they think was introduced at some point. But although there are antlers from peat bogs, they've all been more recent, they've all been Bronze Age. So at the moment I don't think we have any Red Deer or faunal material going back to Mesolithic Orkney, which isn't to say it's not here, it may just be that people haven't really looked for it. Yeah.