Funded Research
Spatiotemporal Dimensions of Population Change in the Northern Orkney Islands, c. 1735-2000
Source: NSF
Active: 9/1/2005 - 02/28/2010
Investigator(s):
James Wood
Patricia Johnson
Stephen Matthews
Timothy Murtha
This multidisciplinary study will examine changes in population, settlement, and land use in the northern islands of Orkney, located off the northernmost coast of mainland Scotland. The period of interest, c. AD 1735-2000, witnessed a transition from a traditional system of subsistence production based on small-scale farming, livestock rearing, and fishing, to a modern system of beef production for markets outside of Orkney. The same period also saw a movement from a homeostatic demographic regime with high fertility, high mortality, and limited migration, to a system of low fertility, low mortality, net out-migration, depopulation, and population aging. The goal of the study is to analyze these inter-related changes to learn how a sustainable, preindustrial demographic system was dismantled and turned into one at high risk of ultimate extinction. The project is unusual in focusing on changes in the spatial organization of settlement and production as an integral part of the processes resulting in demographic destabilization.
During the three-year funding period, the team will spend 12 weeks in the field each summer (i) coding and entering old parish records of baptisms, marriages, and burials, civil registers of births, marriages, and deaths, census data, family histories, and other old documentary sources for historical demographic reconstruction; (ii) carrying out surveys of the remains of croft houses, farm structures, field boundaries, turf dykes, and other archaeological evidence of human settlement and land use; (iii) conducting ethnographic interviews with residents over the age of 60 years to gain their insights into recent processes of demographic and economic change; and (iv) working in the Orkney Archives to digitize images of old cadastral (property boundary) maps, land and house valuation books, rentals, and other documents related to farming and land use. All these data sources will be geo-referenced (tagged with exact spatial coordinates) and linked in a single geographic information system (GIS). Outside the field, we will link the historical demographic data to reconstruct the life courses of individuals, families, and households. Household information will also be linked to the information from the archaeological survey, allowing us to track families as they move across the landscape. Finally, existing data from soil surveys, climatological reconstructions, and remote sensing will be added to the GIS database, providing a rich portrait of a changing human population across time and space.
This project brings to bear an innovative combination of models and methods from several fields on the study of demographic and economic 'modernization.' Historical demography has never before been carried out in conjunction with historical archaeology, and the combination of the two will allows the investigators to understand demographic change within its larger environmental and spatial context. Ethnographic work with living informants will allow the investigators to tap rich family histories and personal memories of change. Finally, new theoretical models and statistical procedures have been developed to support the analysis, interpretation, and generalization of the field data, and these models and procedures can be applied to data from other parts of the world.
