South East Scotland has always been central to narratives of the Scottish and British Iron Age.
All understandings are founded on the RCAHMS Inventories of Berwickshire (1915), Midlothian (1929), East Lothian (1924), West Lothian (1929), Roxburghshire (1956), Selkirkshire (1957), and Peeblesshire (1967). These corpuses have been augmented by further programmes of new surveys, particularly through aerial photography and now LIDAR. This work has vastly increased our understanding of new sites and landscapes, particularly in the agricultural rich zones of South East Scotland.
The first discoveries of plough-levelled sites recorded as cropmarks date to the very inception of air photography in the 1920s. In the century since, regular flights have discovered hundreds of cropmarks that add to our understanding of the upstanding earthworks that have survived the plough (eg Halliday 1982; Cowley 2009; 2016).
Excavations have been undertaken across the area for over a century. In the post-war period, the Scottish Borders was a hot spot for excavation. Modern developments, such as quarrying, housing and infrastructure development, as well as academic research initiated a swathe of new excavations from the 1970s. This led to new insight into major type sites and today the area, particularly East Lothian, is rapidly becoming one of the most intensively studied in Iron Age Europe.