People and Landscape at the Heart of Neolithic Orkney

With increasing understanding of the nuanced relationships between people and the environment, Neolithic archaeology has eschewed its focus on individual sites to embed interpretations that incorporate the landscape settings within which human activity took place (e.g. Bradley 2005, 2011). Yet, despite the fact that publications frequently reference the landscape in title and text, more often than not landscape is simply used as a passive background to the archaeological imagination. It has seemingly proven harder to take the next step of using actual data to support postulations. This is surprising given the wide suite of techniques now available within the broad reach of archaeology to provide data at scales relevant to past human experience, and which can be used to refine archaeological interpretations at the landscape level.