Richard Tipping on environmental archaeology

Environmental reconstruction
Environmental archaeologist Richard Tipping plays an important role in piecing together the history of the landscape: 'My job in archaeology is to try to reconstruct the landscape around archaeological sites. Where the field archaeologist investigates the site and way of life of the people who lived there, I specialise in looking at the environment that they lived in: what plants were there, what settlements could have looked like, how the environment has changed and how the landscape could have changed over time through actions like erosion.'

To do this Richard investigates several areas of evidence: 'I look at the soils that people would have farmed. In a landscape like this I need to investigate how peat has grown and affected how people lived, how they tried to cope with it and how it may have affected settlement. I can also investigate the sediments in the loch. These can hold environmental clues just like an archive of environmental changes through time. This includes microscopic evidence like pollen grains, which can identify the types of plants or crops that were grown here.'

Auger survey
Richard was called in to this Time Team dig to try to find out how the prehistoric landscape had changed over time. To do this he conducted an auger survey, whereby a core-sampling hand drill is screwed into the ground to gather a snapshot of the underlying stratigraphy.

'Peat can be made up of woods, mosses and sedges, and we can tell a lot about environmental change from the composition of the layers,' says Richard. 'The deepest I've found here is about 1.5 metres but most of it is fairly shallow. I would imagine that in recent centuries people have cut whatever they can for fuel.'

History to burn
'By estimating how fast peat accumulates I'd say that the 1.5 metre deposits could be 2,500 years old,' he continues. That's around the end of the archaeology that we're excavating. There is some debate that an environmental change could have occurred some 2,500 years ago that made this area unsuitable to settle. All of this hypothesis comes from peat – a whole record of prehistoric climate change and people's work on the land that is locked up in something you can burn in your fireplace.'

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