'Borderlands' archaeological project by top US university

by DOUGLAS SHEPHERD

A collection of works which will flow from a three-year research programme headed by an eminent professor of archaeology at California's Stanford University is expected to shed new light on life through the ages in the lands which straddle modern day Scotland and England.

And although the academic base for the project is some 5,000 miles from the Scottish Borders, the man behind the ambitious programme is extremely well qualified for the task.

Professor Michael Shanks has been involved in various pieces of research in this part of the world, and his personal logo is taken from an 18th Century gravestone in Dryburgh Abbey's burial ground.

The professor told Not Just Sheep & Rugby of his passion for the rich history of the Borderlands, the title of the project which is scheduled to run until 2023.

He said: "Key questions that drive the project are - just what is a region? How might we represent the diverse and many voices of a region like the English-Scottish borders? In ways that respect deep histories and memories. In ways that avoid reducing people and their experiences to caricatures. My aim was, and still is, to speak with and for those who have been hidden from history. And yes, mobilising the latest theory and method in the social sciences and humanities."

Professor Shanks was born in Blyth, Northumberland, and read Archaeology and Anthropology at Peterhouse Cambridge, graduating in 1980.

He explained: "Enthusiastic about the new developments in archaeological thought that I encountered in Cambridge’s vibrant research community at the end of the 70s, I returned north and moved into full time archaeological fieldwork in the City of Newcastle-upon-Tyne."

Professor Shanks moved to Stanford in the Silicon Valley in 1999 but has maintained a close contact with his former colleagues in the North-east of England. 

He explains on his website: "I have researched the design of beer cans as well as ancient Greek perfume jars, prehistoric landscapes and ancient cityscapes – the great stone megalithic monuments of Atlantic Europe, the city states of the ancient Greek world in the Mediterranean. I have advised the Mayor of Rotterdam on cultural policy,

"And I do what most people associate with archaeology – dig up the past – as part of the team excavating the Roman town of Binchester in the rolling hills of the English border with Scotland – the place that Ptolemy, the ancient geographer, called VINOVIUM (“On the wine road”)."

Borderlands will concentrate on three locations - Dere Street, the Roman road which traverses the region from south to north; the River Coquet, and the coastline of northern England and southern Scotland.

In his academic description of the Borderlands research Professor Shanks says: "Project Borderlands builds on more than two decades of collaborative research to deliver an annotated portfolio of texts, imagery and media work that explores the phenomenon of borderlands.

"Case studies, thick description, “deep mapping” of the English-Scottish borders, from prehistory through to late modernity, will deliver a rich and nuanced manifestation of this vital component of human experience and in so doing to contribute to a body of theory concerned with the dynamic processes involved in 'bordering'".

And according to the professor: "Archaeology is all about collaboration and I am comfortable in what I see as a wave of new thinking about the Borders, from prehistoric times to contemporary. What will this look like? My archaeology has always been experimental. 

"The eighteenth century was such a formative time in the Borders and it is there that I seek some models, in the antiquarians, in the historians of the Scottish enlightenment and beyond. Not tied to modern disciplinary borders they ranged far and wide in their exploring; I have been doing the same. am looking forward to the experiment in and around what I have called deep mapping. In simple pragmatic terms this will be a series of books, articles, and online works."

He told us: "I don’t need to tell you about the cultural wealth of the Borders, both the English and Scottish sides. Of course the border line is part of relatively recent, in archaeological terms, manifestation of political territory and sovereignty. More than ever, in this globalist world of ours, borders are charged spaces. The project aims to offer a case study in such cultural energy."

The project is funded by an innovation grant from Stanford University.

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