People, Animals, Landscapes and Environments of Late Glacial Scotland (PALaEoScot)

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Despite a long-standing fascination with the 'Antiquity of Man', the evidence for human life in Ice Age Scotland is sparse and under researched. A low-density of archaeological finds has been compounded by a research tradition that has persistently excluded the possibility of human settlement at the extreme edge of north-west Europe prior to the start of the Holocene (c.11,700 yrs ago). This is at odds with palaeoclimate and palaeoenvironmental data and, indeed, the recent discovery of unequivocal Late Upper Palaeolithic sites has provided indisputable evidence for human activity in Late Pleistocene Scotland. Now, with the perceptual barrier of more than a century lifted, the combined study of Scotland's Late Glacial palaeoenvironments and landscapes, and the humans and animals who recolonised those changing worlds, offers vast and unrealised potential: to better understand pioneer populations, explore behavioural flexibility and resilience, and illuminate cultural and biological connections across the now-submerged areas of northern Europe. However, in order to understand the human past where little conventional archaeological evidence belies an undoubted human presence, new approaches are required. PALaEoScot will examine the history of research into Scotland's deeper past and unearth new archaeological evidence for the nature of human activity, society and culture in the Late Pleistocene. Employing a unique archaeo-ecological approach centred on the animals that shared and shaped the human past, we will employ cutting-edge biomolecular and isotopic analyses to reconstruct Scotland's Late Pleistocene living landscapes and - using computational modelling to integrate palaeo -environmental, -ecological and archaeological data - will explore the constraints and potentials of contemporary human dispersals. PALaEoScot will illuminate human and animal life in north-west Europe at the end of the Last Ice Age and create new ways of approaching low visibility archaeology.