Farming and Feasting at the Iron Age site of Mine Howe, Orkney

24th February 2014

The talk will take place this coming Thursday, the 27th February at 1730, at the Environmental Research Institute, Castle Street.

Dr Ingrid Mainland, from Orkney College UHI will be talking to us about ‘Farming and Feasting at the Iron Age site of Mine Howe, Orkney’

Excavations at Minehowe, an enigmatic site on the Orkney Mainland, have recovered rich bioarchaeological assemblages including carbonised plant remains, land and marine molluscs and mammal, bird and fish bone, dating from the 3rd century BC to the fourth-fifth centuries AD. This talk will focus on mammalian fauna from Mine Howe and how such evidence can be used to explore farming practices and diet in Iron Age Orkney.

Ingrid Mainland is a Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at Orkney College UHI. On graduating from Durham University with a BA Hons in Archaeology, she undertook her PhD at Sheffield University. After a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Sheffield, she held a Lectureship at Bradford University from 1999 until moving back to Orkney in 2010. Ingrid is an environmental archaeologist whose research focuses on North Atlantic islands and palaeodiet; she has published research on faunas from Greenland and Iceland, and is environmental archaeologist for several Orkney sites. Sustainability is a major theme of her research, using environmental data to address long term trajectories of human-environment relations and societal resilience in island ecosystems.

Doors open at 1715 – all ERI Seminars are free and open to all. Light refreshments will be available.

The ERI Seminar series is supported by SSE Renewables.