Loch Kinord is situated at Muir of Dinnet in Aberdeenshire, it features two man made islands called crannogs shown in figure 1. The crannogs known as Castle and Prison Island respectively were built in the 9th century using layers of tree trunks, stones and other materials and had been inhabited till around the early 14th century. To understand more about the past societies that built and used this site I am going to look at methods used in landscape archaeology, environmental archaeology and geoarchaeology such as pollen and soil studies, LIDAR, Excavating and methods of Remote sensing. I will show how we use these methods to find out which would the most suitable to learn about the past environment that the ancient societies lived in.
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This method provides information on how humans would have used plants and other resources chronologically through time. Pollen grains are produced by all plants which means that they will always leave evidence behind. The outer coating of the grain is called exine which is very resistant to decay and in an anaerobic or wet environment such as near or on a crannog they would be preserved very well. Samples of soil would be removed from the ground in a core then examined under a microscope, the pollen grains are identified by a “number of features such as the size, shape, surface texture and number and type of apertures” (Jones, 2011). The different species found in the sample are recorded on a pollen diagram and when the pollen diagrams for different levels are compared it will identify changes in the percentages of species and therefore changes in the local environment. A paper by O’Brien et al in 2005 covered the topic of sediment-based archaeological findings on crannogs using a combination of pollen, plant macrofossil, diatom, chironomid and Coleopteran analyses. From using these combined techniques they discovered the time of the crannogs construction, how long it was inhabited for as well as the plant and tree coverage in the area during the time of each sample. Proving to be an effective method of revealing the past …show more content…
The problems of aerial photography can be solved by using LiDAR, a technology using laser scanners mounted onto aircraft. LiDAR works by generating a point cloud from the measurements provided by the laser which are plotted by a GPS to create accurate coordinates of each measurement. The point cloud is then used to create a detailed map of the ground surface by separating the canopy data which is made from trees and other objects above the ground from the bare earth data (Eeckhaut et al., 2007). Using maps generated through the use of LiDAR we can interpret many details about the lands past, one example is using the results of vegetation characteristics such as vertical profile, height, etc. Using both the elevation and the vegetation cover models we can analyse “past landscapes, since the relief shape and terrain characteristics, represented partially by vegetation properties, have influenced the settlement patterns and land use.” (Ostir,
Figure …show more content…
This method provides information on how humans would have used plants and other resources chronologically through time. Pollen grains are produced by all plants which means that they will always leave evidence behind. The outer coating of the grain is called exine which is very resistant to decay and in an anaerobic or wet environment such as near or on a crannog they would be preserved very well. Samples of soil would be removed from the ground in a core then examined under a microscope, the pollen grains are identified by a “number of features such as the size, shape, surface texture and number and type of apertures” (Jones, 2011). The different species found in the sample are recorded on a pollen diagram and when the pollen diagrams for different levels are compared it will identify changes in the percentages of species and therefore changes in the local environment. A paper by O’Brien et al in 2005 covered the topic of sediment-based archaeological findings on crannogs using a combination of pollen, plant macrofossil, diatom, chironomid and Coleopteran analyses. From using these combined techniques they discovered the time of the crannogs construction, how long it was inhabited for as well as the plant and tree coverage in the area during the time of each sample. Proving to be an effective method of revealing the past …show more content…
The problems of aerial photography can be solved by using LiDAR, a technology using laser scanners mounted onto aircraft. LiDAR works by generating a point cloud from the measurements provided by the laser which are plotted by a GPS to create accurate coordinates of each measurement. The point cloud is then used to create a detailed map of the ground surface by separating the canopy data which is made from trees and other objects above the ground from the bare earth data (Eeckhaut et al., 2007). Using maps generated through the use of LiDAR we can interpret many details about the lands past, one example is using the results of vegetation characteristics such as vertical profile, height, etc. Using both the elevation and the vegetation cover models we can analyse “past landscapes, since the relief shape and terrain characteristics, represented partially by vegetation properties, have influenced the settlement patterns and land use.” (Ostir,