TopoFlight

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. Figure 1 - Loch Kinord aerial view of Prison and castle island (Canmore) The first method that can give evidence about a past environment is the use of pollen and soil analysis. 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…