Land and the Highland Clearances from the soil upwards
Abstract: Despite their significance, popular experience of the Highland Clearances, a series of mass evictions and forced migrations in Gaelic-speaking Scotland from c1750-c1886, remain understudied in both history and archaeology. Using a combination of landscape archaeology and oral testimony this study proposes a new way of understanding the relationship between evicted Gaelic people and the places they lived and worked. In doing so, this paper recentres Gaelic people in their own histories, and provide new ways of looking at key debates on land rights and knowledges in the Gàidhealtachd as well as provide a challenge for future, bottom-up, interdisciplinary studies.
Bio: Euan Healey is a PhD historian and archaeologist at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. His work focuses on the interactions between subsistence labour and the environment in rural and maritime settings, with his PhD exploring fishing in Gaelic-speaking Scotland. He is currently a visiting researcher at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, and an uninvited guest on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations, where he is considering interactions, parallels and colonialisms involving Gaelic-speaking and Indigenous people in Canada.