Land snails, sand dunes and archaeology in the Outer Hebrides

Law, M ORCID: 0000-0002-6127-5353 and Thew, N (2015) 'Land snails, sand dunes and archaeology in the Outer Hebrides.' Journal of the North Atlantic, 9 (sp). pp. 125-133. ISSN 1935-1933

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3721/037.002.sp908

Abstract

Although the Western Isles have been subject to a number of recent archaeological investigations, there has been limited recent work on molluscan assemblages, despite the very good degree of preservation to be expected in a number of deposits and the significant work in the 1970s and 1980s on a number of sites such as Northton, Baleshare, and Hornish Point. In the meantime, land snail analysis has flourished in southern England and elsewhere in Europe, with the development of new techniques of numerical analysis such as the taxocene framework, the use of land snail assemblages in climate reconstruction, and recent refinements in amino acid dating. This paper provides a brief summary of the work to date on Hebridean snail assemblages, and presents preliminary results from work in progress, exploring aspects of site-formation processes, middening, land use, and relative dating that can be explored using land snails.

Item Type: Article
Subjects: C Auxiliary Sciences of History > CC Archaeology
G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GB Physical geography
G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GF Human ecology. Anthropogeography
Divisions: School of Sciences
Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.3721/037.002.sp908
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Date Deposited: 25 Jul 2016 16:36
Last Modified: 30 Mar 2023 05:30
URI / Page ID: https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/7766
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