Beyond Decline: Heathland and the Dynamics of Cultural and Environmental Change in Bronze Age Orkney

The archaeological record of Orkney has often been interpreted as indicating a cultural or economic “decline” at the Neolithic–Bronze Age transition, linked with the spread of heathland across a formerly more “productive” agricultural landscape in response to climatic deterioration. In this paper, we explore how early modern Enlightenment thinking might have influenced more recent environmental archaeological narratives about heathland development and human interactions with heathlands, using Orkney as a case study. A review of available palaeoenvironmental and archaeological data from Orkney demonstrates clear changes in the way that land was exploited between the Neolithic and Bronze Age. We argue that these, however, were likely the result of changes in social organization and cosmological beliefs in combination with adaptation to changing environmental conditions, rather than a response to a reduction in the resource base related to increasing heathland. This new synthesis of the available evidence indicates continuity of activity across the Neolithic–Bronze Age transition, rather than abandonment of areas which might be deemed more “marginal” today. We argue that the development of heathland in Orkney did not constrain human activity, but rather enabled a range of new possibilities in both ritual and practical terms, with heathlands being sites of sustainable traditional practices that enabled resilience to environmental or cultural change. Challenging the Enlightenment reframing of heathlands as unproductive “waste” on the basis of ongoing exploration of the palaeoecological and archaeological records may have an important role today in helping to encourage the restoration of traditional farming practices as a part of sustainable management and the conservation of these ecosystems.