 to the conference. It's been a wonderful copy so far. I'm going to say present part of my PhD project. My PhD project was on sky and the western isles. I look at all of the material that's got the western isles and I'm looking at the century from 8th, 9th century to 30th century which is quite a large span of time and material. So for this presentation I thought that I would take a case study looking at two of the islands in my area study, Lewis and South US with a particular focus on 11th century material. So for a quick introduction to my orientation to my area study, this is Sky and the Western Isles looking at the northwest coast of Scotland and the major island here is sky and then this is Lewis, Harris and North, South US, those are the major islands and this chain of islands here is called the outer liberties or the Western Isles. I'm going to use them interchangeably. For this presentation I'm going to focus exclusively on Lewis and South US to compare the material in Lewis. For a quick chronology because the Viking Age has to be chronology country to country. Before the Viking Age is later Iron Age or the Pictish Iron Age between the 400 and 800 AD which it's a bit of a debate whether these people could be called Picts but for simplicity's sake I will just report them as Picts. Then of course you get the Viking Age which begins with the first raids in the Irish Sea and ends 1079 with the formation of the Kingdom of the Isles based on the Isle of Man. Afterwards you get the late Norse period which runs from the Kingdom of the Isles to the Treaty of Perth which is the result of the war between the region of the Scottish Kingdoms where the islands are returned to the Scottish Crown and afterwards you get the early medieval period which is called the Gaelic Renaissance because that is when at least one of the sources Gaelic culture returns to the Isles and the Norse is displaced. As you noted that this chronology is totally based on the sources in the archaeology. So before I begin with the Viking Age landscape I want to discuss briefly the Pre-Viking Age. So the Pictish period is defined by subterranean single-skinned stone foundation roundhouses such as this one illustrated here and the burials before crystallization would be square currents such as that or kissed burials and then they also occupy earlier monuments such as rocks and dunes which were built around the 1st century A.D. but are reoccupied at various different times. Crystallization is likely at this point due to the presence of monastic communities we know through historical sources and some placing data and some sculptural evidence and of course the Celtic language is spoken in the Isles. However after the Pictish period we have a complete change in the landscape. The Norse we know from historical sources come around the late 8th century and you get a complete abandonment of the Pictish period. Pictish settlement sites, there's a complete end to the Pictish settlement sites around late 8th or 9th century as far as we can tell through quite limited data and the lone houses are the houses now are lone houses as they would be built in Norway. You also get a return of paganism with finished pagan graves of both male and female graves and then from the placing data we have the Norse language coming in. The place of the situation in the Scandinavian Isles as well as the Scandinavian whole is quite unique in the sense that Old Norse is the oldest strenum of place names besides some exceptions. That means that Old Norse language completely eradicated the Celtic language and there are some pre-Norse Celtic place names mostly in the outfield so in the heatlands and the peatlands and hills this has been interpreted by Bob Crawford to mean that there's some Pictish survival in the outfield and Old Norse place names also include settlement sites, laws such as land ownership, assembly places and religious pagan Celtic sites. This has been traditionally thought to mean in scholarship two things either war or peace. Generally place name scholars lean towards the war situation due to the uniqueness of the place name situation whereas the Picts were ethnically cleansed from Scotland. They were driven off, they were killed, ones that were kept around were enslaved. However there's also some scholars, particularly archaeologists who argue for assimilation, hybridization or acculturation. One example of acculturation that's been touted a bit is Norse pottery. So the Norse world particularly Western Norway is largely achoramic. They use substone and it's actually a substone industry where of quarrying and producing substone vessels. However in the Western Isles while you have substone is predominantly pottery and the pottery is actually constructed with the same technique as the pre-Norse pottery. However the style of the shape of the vessels are actually in what you would find in Western Norway to substone. So my research question for this presentation is what can it tend to lead to 12th century landscape reveal about this city in Sky and the Western Isles? Methodology and we use two case studies, Lewis and Southwest. I'm going to look at landscape, topography, geography, place names. I'm not a placing specialist at all. I worked with placing specialists but I'm a linguist, nor do I know all Norse or Gaelic so it's actually quite difficult. Exhibition is under the reports of course and I'm going to prepare Levenside Tree Norse houses which are only a handful but they are quite significant. So with South US, South US has probably the best data for settlement sites. It was surveyed in 1990s by Carter University and it was revealed that there are at least erosion and rabbit damage 24 summit mounds along the Western coast of South US. Western coast is marked by a topographic feature called Makar which is sand with grass covering. So you have these grassy plains. It's highly fertile but also very fragile by a lot of management. And we know that in the Pictish period as well as the Norse and beyond the Norse period this landscape was heavily cultivated to the point where there was a collapse of fertility around the 15th century. So it's not surprised that Norse landscape generally focuses on this Makar plain. And I'm going to discuss two settlement sites. One is here called Bornesh. It's at the only natural sheltered harbor on South US. And the other is called Kul Fadar. It's down here. So I'll discuss first Bornesh. Bornesh is a Viking age it's been identified as an elite settlement site. There's quite a significant Viking age hall. But what's interesting is it will let the chronology is from the mid 10th to the 14th century. So quite a lot of continuity. However, the excavators have noted that the architectural style of this longhouse, even though it is a longhouse, a Viking longhouse, the wall is single skinned unlike double skinned Norse houses and the house is semi-supterranean. So it's built very similar to a pre-Norse structure. It's actually called the Hebridean Longhouse because there are other examples. And we have another settlement site called Kul Fadar which is for the south. And again it is a, it's dates from about mid 10th to 13th century. And what's interesting about this is again it's a single skinned, as you can see, subterranean longhouse. But the excavator, Mike Parker-Pearson, has noted that in the vicinity about 20 meters away from this settlement site is a picturesque current that's also excavated. And he noted that the wall of this current is very similar to the wall walls of the longhouse, which possibly has implications for the view of the ancestors. I want to briefly discuss some artifacts, which are tibia's crosses, from both Borneo and Kul Fadar. It's worth to note that while they did find 24 settlement sites along the western coast of South U.S. they did not find one burial. And there are various interpretations for that. They should be pagan burials. However, one interpretation is that, well perhaps, since we have a mid to late 10th century date on these longhouses, perhaps these people were already Christianized. And one example of evidence is these bone crosses from Kul Fadar, as from the earliest levels of the longhouse. And also at Borneish, there are some crosses or possibly doors, hammers, again from the earliest levels. And so it's been interpreted by Neosharples that the people settling Borneish in Kul Fadar are really Christianized. Now onto Lewis. Lewis is characterized, again, by Makar Plain along mostly its western coast, or the eastern coast. It's punctuated by quite a few natural sheltered harbors, particularly where the modern-day city, if you can call it that, on Lewis, of Stornoway is. And it's also where the famous Wichessmen have come from from the 21st century. So once I want to talk about in particular, it's called Barghis. It was excavated as a keyhole excavation mostly on the northwest coast of Lewis. And what's interesting about Barghis is that it's very similar to Kul Fadar. They're both moderate, not too rich, settlement sites, but also they have a similar function as well. They're probably secondary sites and not the main settlement site. But Barghis has a double skinned wall, it's not subterranean, either with dates from the same time period as similar function. So it cannot be called the Hebridean longhouse. It's more longhouse like an Norwegian longhouse, but with Stornoway Foundation. It's also a further example, but that excavation has been published yet, where you do another double skinned longhouse. I want to briefly discuss a pagan cemetery on Lewis. One of my point here I wanted to do to express is that you have a cemetery of seven individuals, and including one very high status female burial, buried with a high Borno Norse artifact such as this ringpin in these belt fittings. And this is updated to the mid to late 10th century. So whereas at Cornish and Kul Fadar we have some kind of Christianization early on, there's definitely still some kind of pagans being expressed. And it's also further, to mid to late 10th century burial, found about two kilometers to the west that was recorded in the 19th or 20th century. Again showing actually high Borno Norse artifacts such as this belt buckle and Irish bridge actually. So briefly I want to discuss this there's St. Olaf's Church in Lewis. I want to bring this up because I tried looking for St. Olaf in the Hebrides. All we found, St. Olaf is of course the pagan state of Norway. And if there's more of them in 11th century, his cult spread throughout Norway into Chutland in Orkney. However it does seem to have come to Lewis and we have no data on this church. But the dedication to suggest 11th to 13th century date. And this suggests a close connection with Norwegian cult of saint practices. We also have some data from Sheelings from recent paper by Foster where he looked at the place-same data of the Sheelings. And he found two different place-sames visiting Sheelings. One is Sater and Green, which is entirely Old Norse. And the other is Argi, which is an Old Norse word but it's first a Gaelic word. And what he did was he looked at not only the place names but the topography and the soil conditions of the sites where the place-sames are. And he found that Sater is better for beef cattle, cattle raised for beef, while Argi is raised as better for milk cattle. And the formal evidence from the settlement sites also suggests this because on Lewis the settlement sites tend to have more beef cattle than milk cattle. Whereas on South US you have more milk cattle than beef. And what I've noticed myself is that there's a clear distinction between Lewis and South US in terms of Lewis has the Sater or the pure Norse with perhaps one Argi site whereas South US has exclusively Argi sites. Again, place-same evidence is tricky but even though it's tricky there's still a clear distinction here. So perhaps when I mentioned before that Bob Crawford has said that there's perhaps a picture survival in the outfield. Shelling's already outfield so perhaps that's what we're seeing on South US for example. So to briefly mention the historical sources because I'm not a historian either but I thought I found very interesting that in the historical sources that even though you have the kingdom of the islands facing the man there is mention of different dynasties who rule different parts of the islands. For example Lewis and Harris is thought to have been ruled by a High Borough Norse or Norse clan whereas South US the US are ruled by a Gaelic clan. And I thought that I think that perhaps we see this discrepancy in the archaeological culture as well. So briefly discuss to compare the two on Lewis you have double skins long houses at least two of them. In South US there'd be a long house two sites multiple long houses. On Lewis 85 percent of place names are Old Norse whereas on South US only 30 percent of place names are Old Norse but it should be noted that wherever you have an Old Norse someone's site on on South US you have an Old Norse place name for a farm. Now you have for example more this more tendency towards beef cattle in Lewis whereas you have more dairy cattle on South US. You have late pagan burials on on Lewis. There aren't any pagan burials in South US that have been found but we do have evidence of likely Christianization early Christianization. We have a saint olive church. There might be more salt ale olive churches haven't found yet but that's the one we found so far. And then we have the historical sources controlled by Norse the Habernos elites and in South US you have Gaelic or likely Gaelic Norse elites. One theory I have on why this is due to geography and sea routes the out of Lewis is notorious for being very difficult to navigate. The butt of Lewis which is right here is considered to be among a sailor either but from my discussion with local sailors you do not want to try to attempt to cross the butt of Lewis because of swells and heavy winds of people weather. The most likely sea routes would be something all the way which is Old Norse for Steering Bay and then heading southwest through the Sound of Paris up and to get to where most of the Viking civilizing burials are on the northwest coast. I think that perhaps due to this I don't think that Lewis was isolated I do think that it was easily controllable so I think that the elites had taken control of the safe harbors and the sea routes which perhaps led to a different more Norse identity whereas South US is a bit of a puzzle because there's only one natural sheltered harbor but South US perhaps due to its proximity to into the Irish sea perhaps it's you have more of a asymmetrical ending situation caused by this geography. So inclusion I perhaps we had we're looking at some kind of Gaelic survival or Gaelic migration that is asymmetrical so perhaps South US was subjected to less Norse settlement and then more and faster Gaelic resettlement compared to Lewis. I do think that we're looking at less given power in the city especially if we consider the Gaelic words are in the outfield perhaps the the picks were reduced to a slave class which has been suggested by many and kept in the outfield at potters and intending the animals while the Norse elites are in the infield. He perhaps did have two cultural zones one more Norse one more Gaelic however I do think that Norse culture is still dominant throughout the Hebrides and even though South US perhaps has some inflections of Gaelic culture they're still likely speaking Norse they're still building Norse longhouses long after mainland Norway stops building longhouses and you know of course in Lewis you also have heavy impoveries suggesting you have some survival picks as well. I do think that then therefore the others do have their own distinct culture identity as a whole. Thank you.