Forthcoming books

Archaeological housework: Excavating the avocational archaeological atelier of Fiona Gorman, Isle of Arran, Scotland

Nyree Finlay

Part excavation and part house clearance, this contemporary archaeological collection study documents the recovery of an unusual heritage assemblage. It involved the recording of domestic workrooms on the Isle of Arran, Scotland. Central to the analysis is the stratigraphy of a forgotten worktable and repurposed containers.

Belonging to Fiona Gorman, avocational archaeologist and former art teacher, the collection comprises an extensive assemblage of found objects. Along with friends she discovered significant new prehistoric sites on Arran through systematic field-walking and landscape reconnaissance. Other items in the collection reveal the convivial and inter-generational attraction of stone gathering with close friends and family and creation of museum displays.

A celebration of recreational heritage participation, it documents domestic curation and repeat cataloguing practices. A unique collection of later dementia works prompts exploration of earlier embodied traces in creative display practices alongside the art and archaeology of assemblage making.

Archaeological housework promotes archaeology as affective care and explores the wider disciplinary neglect of its materialities and indoor practices through one woman’s passion for art, archaeology and the ancient landscapes of her island home.

This book will be published open access under a CC BY-NC Licence.

Publication date: Winter 2025/26

Nyree Finlay is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Glasgow and convenor of the MSc Material Culture and Artefact Studies.
Drawing on a background in Scottish and European prehistory, her research practice centres around lithics using experimental and recursive sensorial assemblage analysis to expose enduring engagements with lithic technologies, craft skill, and stone as mnemonic media.
Other areas of research include gender, personhood, age, the lifecourse, gatherer-hunter archaeological sites and work realising various legacy excavation and collection projects. Current writing, exhibition and installation works includes new directions in the archaeologies of dementia, embodied care, creative knowledge practices and relational (re)collections.
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. Beginnings, people and place
3. Homework: recording an avocational atelier
4. Housework: Alt Beag
5. Housework: Burnbank
6. The table
7. Creative display
8. Reassembling stone practices
9. The materiality of dementia
10. Coda: an ending of sorts
Glossary
References

Beyond the state: music making in the rural creative economy

Simon McKerrell

This book takes an ethnographic approach to understanding music in the rural creative economy of the Highlands and Islands and brings a fresh understanding of sustainability in regional policy and creative lives. Drawing upon ethnographic evidence from over 70 interviews with musicians, venue operators, musical instrument makers, luthiers, music teachers, festival organisers, arts promoters, public officials, charity officers, police and educators, the book reveals the ingenuity, creativity and place-based innovation across the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.

The book argues that one of the results of continuing globalisation and digitalisation of society is a return to local, place-based communities with greater digital visibility, and that creative livelihoods in rural areas are becoming increasingly sustainable because of this movement. The chapters deal with the lived experience of rural and island musical education and performance, and provide an explanation of the impact of continuing state-retreat from the arts and the cultural sector; the importance of place-based enterprise in the rural creative economy; the newly emerging opportunities for rural economic sustainability in the arts using digital media; the barriers to participation for young people and young adults, and; the special nature of rural innovation in the creative economy.

Importantly, this book offers an original contribution to the literature on the creative economy and creative industries, by rethinking the model of capital exchange in music that moves beyond older binary models. The author makes the case that in today’s platformed world, music should not be understood as a commodity, but as a form of labour that includes a much wider range of activity beyond performance including audiences and listeners. This fundamental shift, turns our attention to understanding capital exchange through people’s desire to participate in the arts as the core commodity that supports sustainability in the creative economy.