8.3.10 Environment

(see also Section 4 and Section 10.2)

The last two millennia have until recently been poorly studied by environmentalists in Scotland, who have tended to concentrate on earlier Holocene material. In Argyll pollen work by Rymer (1980) was pioneering, and some wrok was carried out in conjunction with the Iona excavations of Reece (1981) and Barber (1981). More recent work has been carried out in the Oban area (Macklin et al. 2000), around Dunadd (CANMORE ID 39564) (Housley et al. 2004, 2010), and in Kilmichael Glen (Jones et al. 2011). While this work has concentrated on chronology, land-use changes and their possible relationship to climatic fluctuations, unravelling the complexity of sea-level changes in this region have also been studied (Gray and Sutherland 1977, Shennan et al. 2006). Although the sea-level changes at this period are relatively minor, they have been claimed to have had significant impact in some places, for example in Islay with the Rhinns possibly being a separate island (Dawson et al. 1998). This work has only scratched the surface of environmental change at this period and much more needs to be done.