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

尽管人们对“人类的古代”一直很着迷，但冰河时期苏格兰人类生活的证据很少，而且研究不足。考古发现的密度低，再加上研究传统一直排除人类在全新世（约11700年前）开始之前在西北欧最边缘定居的可能性。这与古气候和古环境数据不一致，事实上，最近发现的明确的晚期旧石器时代遗址为晚更新世苏格兰的人类活动提供了无可争辩的证据。现在，随着一个多世纪以来的感知障碍被解除，对苏格兰晚冰期古环境和景观的综合研究，以及重新定居这些不断变化的世界的人类和动物，提供了巨大的、尚未实现的潜力：更好地了解拓荒者群体，探索行为的灵活性和弹性，并阐明现在被淹没的北欧地区的文化和生物联系。然而，为了了解人类的过去，很少有传统的考古证据掩盖了毫无疑问的人类存在，需要新的方法。“古苏格兰”将考察苏格兰更深层过去的研究历史，并为晚更新世人类活动、社会和文化的本质发掘新的考古证据。我们将采用独特的考古生态学方法，以共享和塑造人类过去的动物为中心，采用尖端的生物分子和同位素分析来重建苏格兰晚更新世的生活景观，并使用计算模型来整合古环境、生态和考古数据，探索当代人类扩散的限制和潜力。古苏格兰将照亮最后一个冰河时代末期欧洲西北部的人类和动物生活，并为低能见度考古学开辟新的途径。

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.