Shetland Islands Climate
and Settlement Project
The Shetland Islands
Climate and Settlement Project (SICSP) is a multidisciplinary
research initiative that is investigating:
-
possible links between
past, large-scale, hemispheric climate changes, human
land use practices and local environmental catastrophes in
Shetland's coastal sand areas
-
human responses to
abrupt and severe ecological changes on decadal,
inter-annual and annual time scales
-
economic and social
changes that accompanied the migration of Lowland Scots
families to Shetland in the 16th and 17th
centuries
-
Shetland's maritime and
agricultural economies in a period of great climatic
variability
The
SICSP has been supported by the Arctic Social Sciences
Program, Office of Polar Programs, National Science
Foundation; Bates College and the University of Southern
Maine. The following institutions and agencies have assisted
the research: Dunrossness Primary School; Luminescence
Laboratory, Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of
Art, University of Oxford; Shetland Amenity Trust; Shetland Museum;
South Mainland History Group; and the University of
Bradford Department of Archaeological Sciences.
Multidisciplinary Field
Research
The SICSP's initial focus is
the reconstruction of the environmental and settlement
histories of Quendale Links, Dunrossness, the largest expanse of
coastal sand deposits in Shetland. When the project began ten
years ago, it was known that a post-medieval township called
"Broo" (often spelled "Brow" or "Brew") had been destroyed
there by blowing sand sometime before the mid-1700s.
The chronology of that disaster, its causes and its
larger effects on the local area were
unknown.
Over
the past ten years archaeological
, environmental, and archival investigations have revealed that
Quendale Links is an ecologically and archaeologically complex
area with great potential for revealing information
on the sensitivity of coastal sand environments and their human
settlements to:
-
severe
and abrupt components of climate change,
such as great storms
-
large-scale geological
factors, such as sea level changes
-
land use factors, such
as over-grazing and over-cultivation
-
biological factors,
such as the introduction of burrowing animals and plant
species resistant to eolian erosion and and animal
grazing.
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