Beverley Ballin Smith – författare

Excavations at Carnoustie produced exceptional archaeological results from the prehistoric past. The remains of the longest early Neolithic timber hall so far found in Scotland were identified. Beside it were the postholes and pits of another contemporary but less well preserved large hall. A final but smaller timber hall was constructed at one end but within the footprint of the largest timber hall. This latter structure indicated the importance of the place and the perpetuation of ideologies and traditions of the earlier building. During the later Neolithic, other evidence included the sparse remains of an oval house built over the remains of one timber hall with temporary re-occupation of part of another. The main focus of activities during the middle and late Neolithic were groups of pits whose presence indicated changes in social structure and possibly economic conditions. A period of abandonment with only sporadic use of the area during the early Bronze Age was followed by a roundhouse settlement. A small number of buildings of the middle and late Bronze Age were replaced in rotation. The last buildings were intimately associated with a rare late Bronze Age metalwork hoard, buried close to them. The hoard included a sword, spearhead with gold decoration and a long pin wrapped in textile and sheep-skin.

This volume is a collection of 30 papers on the broad subject of the Scandinavian expansion westwards to Britain, Ireland and the North Atlantic, with a particular emphasis on settlement. The volume has been prepared in tribute to the work of Barbara E. Crawford on this subject, and to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the publication of her seminal book, Scandinavian Scotland. Reflecting Dr Crawford's interests, the papers cover a range of disciplines, and are arranged into four main sections: History and Cultural Contacts; The Church and the Cult of Saints; Archaeology, Material Culture and Settlement; Place-Names and Language. The combination provides a variety of new perspectives both on the Viking expansion and on Scandinavia's continued contacts across the North Sea in the post-Viking period.Contributors include: Lesley Abrams, Haki Antonsson, Beverley Ballin Smith, James Barrett, Paul Bibire, Nicholas Brooks, Dauvit Broun, Margaret Cormac, Neil Curtis, Clare Downham, Gillian Fellows-Jensen, Ian Fisher, Katherine Forsyth, Peder Gammeltoft, Sarah Jane Gibbon, Mark Hall, Hans Emil Liden, Christopher Lowe, Joanne McKenzie, Christopher Morris, Elizabeth Okasha, Elizabeth Ridel, Liv Schei, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Brian Smith, Steffen Stumann Hansen, Frans Arne Stylegård, Simon Taylor, William Thomson, Gareth Williams, Doreen Waugh and Alex Woolf.