This article will explore a repopulating approach as a means of producing archaeological and historical narratives of upland land use in the Scottish Highlands which go beyond tired notions of marginality, liminality and peripherality. These narratives, historically dominant in the study of upland landscapes, continue to have harmful impacts on the contemporary communities of these landscapes. Through the case study of Rannoch Moor, a material focus on taskscapes, movement and interactions allows for the production of narratives which highlight the past busyness of landscapes often now considered to be empty and ‘wild’. In the current economic and political climate, as restoration and rewilding, often carried out at a landscape scale are increasingly incentivised in this region it is important that archaeological and historical narratives produced about such landscapes reflect their cultural dimensions as landscapes once populated and managed intensively and sustainably, and only comparatively recently cleared. This article takes an explicitly activist archaeological approach to the production of creative and embodied interpretative narratives in an attempt to present an engaging alternative to the dominant narratives of upland emptiness and wildness.
Edward C. Stewart (Fri,) studied this question.