Serjeantson, Dale (2013) Farming and Fishing in the Outer Hebrides AD 600 to 1700: The Udal, North Uist Southampton Monographs in Archaeology, New Series No.2., Southampton: Highfield Press, ISBN 978 0 9926336 2 2, pp.164, Pbk, RRP £19.50
Thirty years after I visited the Udal as a postgraduate student and two decades after Iain Crawford concluded his final season of work there, the first fruits of the post-excavation analysis and contextualisation of a site that has acquired almost mythic status amongst archaeologists and environmental historians of the medieval North Atlantic have appeared in this excellent volume. At last we have the interpretation of the mammal (the ‘farming’ of the title refers only to pastoral activity), fish and bird remains presented in a systematic analysis that sets the assemblages into the context of a millennium of profound climatic and environmental changes, dramatic social and cultural transformations, and protracted political upheavals. Perhaps even more critical is the fact that we now have the published data to enable the partial results from sites like Bornais, Bostadh, Cille Pheadair, Cnip or Dun Vulan to be set against the continuum of evidence represented in the occupation sequence at the Udal; this is the vital data-matrix into which the other sites interlock.
For a younger generation of archaeologists who have long had access to the results from Bornais etc, the Udal material may have something of an anticlimactic feel to it as the trends evident in the assemblages have been recognised and discussed in the context of those other excavations. It must be remembered, however, that it was in the often obscurely published or disseminated interim reports or conference papers (e.g. only 50 copies of the 1988 ASHS 2 paper on settlement hierarchy at the Udal were ever produced) that Crawford identified those trends and started the debates on exploitation regimes and cultural significance that have been repeated and developed since in the published reports from other Western Isles sites. The Udal may have come late to its own feast but we have been treated to a banquet to which the previously published material was but a foretaste.
In this volume, Dale Serjeantson has not simply presented the analysis of the bone assemblages as a quantitative exercise or discussion of taphonomic processes but has offered an insightful exploration of the changing resource exploitation regimes suggested by the physical evidence and sets those changes into wider palaeoenvironmental and palaeoclimatic contexts. Rather than start with evidence which forms the primary subject-matter of the volume, after providing the essential background discussion relating to the site-location, excavation chronology and process, and regional comparanda, Serjeantson proceeds to offer us two tightly-focussed chapters on first the economic history and ethnography of the region and secondly the site catchment and environment. While the first is rendered slightly stale by its failure to engage with the very extensive recent research on the Middle Ages in the Hebrides, much of it the product of a series of PhD theses at Glasgow University, the odd leap from Norse and Early Irish sources to the 16th– and 17th-century evidence, and its reliance on some rather dated (and very Whiggish) historiography which would benefit from engagement with the environmental history and environmental geography research published in the last twenty years, the second presents a clear physical and atmospheric context against which the shifts in emphasis on particular stock-management or fishing regimes can be projected. There is a danger in too deterministically seeing those environmental processes as the absolute drivers of regime-change but they do permit insights into the factors which drove the human populations to choose particular response modes and mechanisms. It is in that regard that engagement with the more recent literature on socio-economic and socio-cultural responses to climate change around the medieval North Atlantic would have enriched and informed the discussion, providing a series of comparisons for the experience of the occupants of the Udal that is reflected in the bone assemblages. There might be particular value in considering how the economic response models developed for medieval and early post-medieval Iceland might usefully be applied in an Outer Hebridean context. In essence, however, Serjeantson successfully humanises the discussion by setting out climate-change impacts in human terms and exploring the bone evidence as an indicator of responses to those impacts rather than as simply an almost abstract environmental process in which the human population were passive observers. These are themes to which the discussion returns in the final chapter of the volume, where some of the main trends are set out in summary form; we can hope that the future volumes in the projected series of Udal reports adds considerably more flesh to those summaries.
Serjeantson’s discussion proceeds through detailed exploration of the main mammal, fish and fowl species represented in the assemblages, the changes in balances within them and what that might reflect, and what evidence can be extrapolated for processing techniques. The main emphasis is understandably and rightly on the dairying regime that was established in the Western Isles throughout the Historic era and how the bone evidence reveals that regime as practiced in North Uist. It is not simply a question of herd profile as revealed through NISP and MNI figures, for Serjeantson offers critical reflection alongside the quantitative analysis on how that profile was established through physical environmental factors, climatic limitations and cultural preferences. Presence or absence of age-groups or specific species in also considered in terms of management practice relative to environmental conditions (e.g. through short-range transhumance regimes (reflected perhaps in calf-age), absence of woodland (explaining the paucity of both pigs and red deer) and how the entrenchment of those conditions contributed to determination of human responses and post-hoc explanations for those responses).
There are surprises in the data, as we should expect. For this reviewer, perhaps the biggest of these was the degree to which the Udal remained as much a producer of its own foodstuff as a consumer, despite its development as a high-status site associated with a senior collateral of the Lords of the Isles. The forms of tribute that appear to be represented in the assemblages from Finlaggan, principally choice cuts of pre-butchered meat, that have come to be considered as a manifestation of the complex exchange and support mechanisms through which Gaelic lordly elites and their associates were maintained, do not seem to be present at the Udal. Tribute may have taken other forms – in processed fish or dairy products – but the content of the bone assemblage at the Udal, even allowing for the issue of survival that Serjeantson highlights throughout her analysis, offers a salutary caution against the over-extrapolation and liberal application of the interpreted results from one or two sites in generalised discussion of socio-economic structures and practices throughout a region as environmentally and culturally diverse as the Hebrides. Indeed, what Serjeantson’s interpretation of the data perhaps reveals is the physical evidence for local specialisation in production within a lordship structure that Geoffrey Stell identified in the Clanranald MacDonald lordship that was spread from Moidart to the Uists and where different island components of their domain yielded different ranges of resources on which to sustain their lordly household and retinue. That discussion, however, must come after the wider synthesis of the Udal evidence with already published evidence from elsewhere in the Western Isles.
In conclusion, this long-anticipated volume lives up to the expectations of placed upon it. While it is by no means the last word, for there are substantial aspects within it that require careful digestion and then significant development in the light of more recent archaeological and historical research, it does take our knowledge of the socio-economic and environmental conditions of the Western Isles to a new dimension. It sets our expectations for both the quality of evidence and standard of analysis of what will appear in the next volumes of the report at a heightened level.