by Dr Antonia Thomas
Running over four years (2024-2028), TRANSECTS is a major inter-disciplinary and multi-institutional project focussed on marine energy transitions and their impact on coastal communities. It aims to ensure that offshore renewable energy, including offshore wind and tidal energy, develops in a way that is fair and just. TRANSECTS aims to boost the resilience of coastal communities by drawing on approaches and expertise from multiple disciplines – including contemporary archaeology.
Archaeology and Marine Energy Transitions
Many UK coastal regions, including those in Scotland, have flourished then suffered from the growth and decline of marine energy industries over the past two centuries. These have led to profound environmental and socio-cultural changes due to their often boom-and-bust nature, changes which can not only be seen in the archaeological record, but which also have repercussions for communities today. In the 21st century, the shift to marine renewable energies will further transform the sustainability and resilience of coastal communities and adjacent seas.
Previous research has tended to focus primarily on technical and economic assessments of these transitions and not on their environmental or social-cultural impacts. As Dalglish, Leslie, Brophy and MacGregor (2017) note, a social and cultural understanding of Scotland’s energy transition is essential to determine whether it accords with the principles of sustainable development and landscape justice. Archaeology, with its deep-time and interdisciplinary perspective, is ideally placed to contribute to this understanding. But the new questions posed by the contemporary world require new approaches. These require an expanded notion of what archaeology is – and what it could be (Lee 2018, 144).
Case study areas: Orkney | East Coast Scotland | Humber Estuary
Each of the three areas that TRANSECTS is focussing on has changed their main marine energy economic activity from whale oil via offshore fossil fuels to marine renewable energies. Each of these areas has also experienced changing economic fortunes, marginalisation and (often hidden) hardship caused by these transitions.
TRANSECTS will explore previous – and current – experiences of these energy transitions. We will examine the shifts from marine energy sources:
- Whale oil (1800 to 1900s)
- Oil and gas (later-1900s to present)
- Renewable energy (early-2000s to present)
We will assess these raw energy sources in our three-case study areas and examine how nearby communities have been affected during marine energy transitions. We will work directly with coastal communities to develop strategies to enable energy transitions that increases resilience for them, and the environment they depend on.
Research Areas
There are four interlinked research areas in the TRANSECTS project:
- Natural Capital Stocks and Flows – ensuring that society’s dependence on natural resources for energy is considered when assessing the impacts of marine energy transitions and how they have affected coastal community resilience.
- Re-peopling the Past – exploring how communities understand and interpret the changes caused by energy transitions, using creative, heritage and archaeology-based, participatory mapping and place-based approaches.
- Just Transition – examining the impacts of marine energy transitions on people and places, with an emphasis on just and unjust transitions, and comparing indictors of social and political economy change for coastal communities.
- Theory of Change – assisting communities to develop strategies to enable future marine energy transitions that increase the resilience of coastal and marine ecosystems and the communities that depend on them.
Research Area 2: “Re-peopling the past” is being led by a team from UHI (Antonia Thomas, Dan Lee, Anne Bevan and Jen Harland) with David Atkinson from University of Hull, and will integrate contemporary archaeology into the wider TRANSECTS project as part of creative, heritage, and archaeology-based approaches.
What can Contemporary Archaeology add to these discussions?
Archaeology – fundamentally the study of the relationship between people, places, and things through time – plays a key role in understanding transitions and change in the past. And by questioning the status quo and the potential of change, archaeology can play an important role not only in the present, but in the future (Thomas et al 2018, 126).
The archaeology of the contemporary world is naturally interdisciplinary, and our methods will use approaches drawn from across the arts and humanities – integrating contemporary archaeology, historical geography, and cultural heritage (both intangible and intangible) with art and creative practice – to articulate how communities understand and interpret energy transitions. Such inter- and trans-disciplinary thinking is crucial to tackle the complexity of the contemporary world (Braidotti and Hlavajova 2018: 10).
In TRANSECTS, we will use place-based and participatory methods including archaeological and archival research, participatory mapping, walking workshops, and collaborative creative practice. Our contemporary archaeology approach in TRANSECTS aligns with the collaborative practice-based methodology of art/archaeology (Bailey 2018) and will use art and archaeology as reference points from which to explore wider creative engagements – across and beyond disciplines (Thomas et al 2018; Wall and Hale 2020). Visual and artistic responses to marine energy transitions in the past, and the present, will provide starting points for contemporary creative exhibitions and outputs, through collaboration and dialogue with creative practitioners and wider publics.
All three of the marine energy sources we are looking at in TRANSECTS have also impacted on more popular forms of material and visual culture too, from souvenirs and board games, films, adverts, songs, and much more besides.
What do these tell us about the impact of energy transitions in the past? And how can we use these objects to start conversations about the present and future?
What we will do
- Knowledge exchange workshops – used to co-develop methods, gather responses
- Place-based activities – walkshops will enable participants to think outside, exploring the topics and gather responses in landscape
- Creative activities – creative activities such as collage and interventions will be used to explore the topics with participants
- Participatory mapping – used as a tool to explore the topics creatively using maps in workshops inside and in landscape
- Creative outputs – working with artists to make new work responding to the project themes
- Story maps – collation of research, histories and stories into an interactive online map
- Exhibitions – touring mini-exhibitions sharing the research and creative outputs
Contemporary archaeology can help us understand the history of our present and also allow us to imagine different futures. By integrating these different contemporary archaeology approaches within the wider TRANSECTS project, we aim to help coastal communities to explore their roles and responses to energy transitions, in the past, present and future.
Our contribution to TRANSECTS complements several other recent and current contemporary archaeology projects in Scotland, such as Dan Lee’s research (at the UHI) into Orkney’s energy heritage and archaeology, and Jonathan Gardner’s current research (at the University of Edinburgh) on the longstanding exploitation of Scottish hydrocarbon resources as a form of contested heritage.
We can also chart the relationship between contemporary archaeology, energy transitions and art/visual culture in Aberdeen’s NUART Festival, which the city has hosted since 2017, following the lead of the NUART Festival which began in Stavanger, Norway, in 2001. In 2019, several members of #3M-DO (the forerunner to INCAScot), hosted a workshop in Aberdeen during the NUART festival, to explore how graffiti and street art (and the distinction/tensions between these two forms of visual and material expression) can be understood as contemporary archaeology relating to the North-East’s energy transition and Aberdeen’s regeneration. See: Art is the new oil – International network for contemporary archaeology in Scotland
In addition to the environmental, economic and social data that normally articulates industrial shifts, TRANSECTS will use an interdisciplinary place- and time-based approaches to encompass the voices, emotions, memories and identities that are impacted by marine energy transitions. Contemporary archaeology is a crucial aspect of these discussions.
More information
TRANSECTS is led by Karen Alexander from Heriot-Watt University, and includes partners from Heriot-Watt University, UHI Orkney, University of Aberdeen, University of Hull, and the University of Strathclyde. It will run from April 2024 – April 2028 and is one of four projects to share £14.8 million in funding through the Resilient Coastal Communities and Seas Programme, which is funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) the UK’s national funding agency for investing in science and research – and the UK Government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
Find out more here: TRANSECTS Research Navigating the Transition to Marine Renewable Energies
References
Bailey, D. (2018). ‘Art/Archaeology: What Value Artistic–Archaeological Collaboration?’, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 4 (2): 246–56. https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.34116
Braidotti, R. and Hlavajova, M. (2018). ‘Introduction’, in R. Braidotti and M. Hlavajova, eds, Posthuman Glossary, 1–14, London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Dalglish, C., Leslie, A., Brophy, K., and Macgregor, G. (2017). Justice, development and the land: the social context of Scotland’s energy transition. Landscape Research, 43(4), 517–528. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2017.1315386
Lee, D. H. J. (2018). ‘Experimental mapping in archaeology: process, practice and archaeologies of the moment’, in M. Gillings, P. Haciguzeller and G. Lock, eds, Re-Mapping Archaeology: Critical Perspectives, Alternative Mappings, 43–176, London: Routledge.
Thomas, A., D. Lee, U. Frederick and C. White (2018). ‘Beyond Art/Archaeology: Research and Practice after the “Creative Turn”’, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 4 (2): 121–9. https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.33150
Wall, G. and A. Hale (2020). ‘Art and Archaeology: Uncomfortable Archival Landscapes’, International Journal of Art and Design Education 39 (4): 770–87. https://doi.org/10.1111/jade.12316