Farming and fishing in the Outer Hebrides AD 600 to 1700: the Udal, North Uist

Abstract

This account of animal husbandry, fishing and wildfowling in the Hebrides is based on a study of the animal remains excavated between 1964 and 1982 from the site of Udal North on the island of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides in the west of Scotland. The settlement went out of use just as the first historic and ethnographic accounts of the region were written and the zooarchaeological evidence is used as a test of how far the agricultural and subsistence practices described were found. Some changes in husbandry and fishing took place with the advent of Viking raiders and then with Gaelo-Norse overlords, but there was a strong degree of continuity in the ways in which cattle were managed, horses were used and the scarcity of pigs as well as in fishing strategies and the exploitation of the abundant local seabird colonies. These were long-term adaptations to the unusual local geography and environment of the Outer Hebrides