The Question That the Discovery Poses for Living Communities

The discovery at Loch Borralie, like all significant archaeological discoveries, has implications that extend beyond the academic community to the broader public’s understanding of the human past.

But it also has specific implications for how living communities — particularly the communities of the Scottish Highlands and Islands, whose ancestors inhabited this landscape in the Iron Age — understand their own prehistory.

Scotland has a complex relationship with its prehistoric past.

The landscape is densely marked by prehistoric monuments — cairns, brochs, standing stones, duns — that are part of the everyday visual landscape of the Highlands and Islands.