Overall, while we have the makings of a ‘big picture’ narrative for developments in south-east Scotland between around 3800 BC and 2500 BC, there are still huge gaps in our knowledge. This includes questions about overall settlement and land use patterns, climate and environmental change, and the nature of society and its changes over this long period. The only extant Neolithic human remains from south-east Scotland are cremated, meaning that we cannot undertake the DNA analyses that would allow us to compare their genetic signature with that of other contemporary individuals in Britain and beyond. Likewise, assemblages of faunal remains are extremely sparse and small – although evidence of dairy farming during the Early Neolithic has been obtained from lipid analysis of Carinated Bowl pottery from the Hirsel. This revealed dairy lipids as well as evidence for cooking ruminant meat, along with some kind of plant material (Cramp 2012; Cramp et al 2014).
Much of our evidence for specific monument types comes from aerial photography, and remains to be ground-truthed through excavation and dating. Further insights may be obtained from other remote surveying methods such as LiDAR as they become publicly available. Moreover, our evidence for environmental and climate change is patchy. Richard Tipping’s detailed study of the Bowmont Valley in the Cheviot Hills, Scottish Borders (Tipping, 2020) provides an exemplary account for one part of our study area.
Developer-funded excavations are noted to provide some information upon the Neolithic and other periods, particularly in areas of development pressures which vary significantly across the south-east Scotland region. Resulting reports from such fieldwork is often called ‘grey literature’ with results either submitted in advance of planning applications or deriving from planning conditions. Whilst invariably now born-digital as reports and submitted to the planning authorities and their curatorial archaeology services HERs, with the index terms added to the OASIS forms accompanying the reports. These all transfer to the Archaeology Data Service Library in time and abstract details to the HES Trove.Scot database. However, there remains a bottleneck in curatorial archaeology sign-off and, perhaps years later, for any HER to fully accession all the details of sites, monument and find types recorded to the HER entries. The full details of the sites, particularly if reaching fuller article or even monograph publication, are rarely wholly entered into the OASIS project forms and are hampering of the researcher.
For this reason, Discovery and Excavation in Scotland remains an equally accessible primary source for recent discoveries, both inside and out of the planning process, just as the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland remain an essential source of information on ancient finds. However, some Artificial Intelligence and natural language processing work for the creation of index terms is already being carried out, with the materials added already to OASIS and the Archaeology Data Service Library.
Whilst all the regional curatorial archaeology services promote the use of OASIS, and therefore with the follow-on Archaeology Data Service Library and Trove.Scot entries, there is both the backlog of ‘current’ data entry, as well as those unpublished reports, those that have stalled in publication, as well as those prior to the 2008 Scottish adoption of OASIS or of the older published literature itself, where retro-data entry and uploading or accessioning of older reports as a whole to the HERs also required. This may, of course, be problematical in the death of original authors or the copyright issues of companies no longer in existence, where there is no clear resolution of work being carried out. The likes of older literature may require scanning or digitisation in the first instance for an Event record to be created, but it may have many hundreds of individual find or site entries that also need revising too.
Such enhancement of the older literature beyond monument types alone is required for bettering find (objects) type records and periods to modern terminologies. Further in the likes of the Neolithic period then more for the free-text description of text is also required, for the likes of style of pottery recovered when a variety of decoration might be the case, say for example to differentiate Grooved Ware from other forms of pottery where object type alone shared. This would allow regional corpora of artefact or site types to be created to build up a detailed picture of people’s lives during this period.