How the Earliest Human Communities Adapted to Their Setting

Popular readings of the Hebrides have tended to simplify its history into two layers of development. What forms the landscape of modern times, with its nineteenth-century roots in the re-organisation of settlements into crofts and the clearance of others into sheep farms or deer forests, is seen as forming one layer, the most recent layer. Meanwhile, the runrig touns that preceded the clearances, with their organisation of farming and resource exploitation around small communities, are seen as providing the foundational order of a landscape whose roots take us back deep into prehistory. In a 1955 essay on the isle of Lewis, Andrew Geddes wrote that in the ‘‘Outer’ Hebrides, commonly regarded as the most ‘outlying’ inhabited lands of the British Isles, are revealed not only the most ancient of British rocks, the Archaean, but probably the oldest form of communal life in Britain. This life, in present and past, will interest some by characteristics which may seem unique …. These might be compared to the Archean rock, overlain toward the south-east by a succession of younger strata, but forming their foundation’. This attempt to align the region’s geology with its history owed much to the thinking of the nineteenth-century geologist, Alexander Geikie, who also thought that the cultural foundations of the Hebrides was as ancient in its own terms as its underlying geology. Any doubt as to what was being argued here was removed by the geographer Estyn Evans who, in a lecture to the Advancement of Science meeting in Glasgow in 1960, argued that runrig and infield-outfield, the institutional forms through which pre-crofting touns in the Hebrides were adapted to their environmental setting, first took shape with the pioneer farmers of the Neolithic. The view taken here is that such a reading over-simplifies the story of Hebridean cultural ecology, effectively stripping out much of its history. It does so not just by seeing the origin of its pre-crofting forms as rooted deep in prehistory but by assuming, as an extension, that subsequent cultural, political, demographic, biotic and environmental change brought about no substantive re-adjustment to it. I want to argue that virtually every phase of its history challenges this idea that we are dealing with a static unchanging relationship between communities and their setting.