Information about the project

The North Orkney Population History project is supported by the National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Undergraduates program.  The grant for NOPH provides travel, lodging, food allowance and a stipend for students who become part of the project.  There is no academic credit earned and no tuition charged for participation in the project.  Selection of applicants will be rigorous and we encourage only serious and committed students to apply.  The deadline for receipt of all application material is December 15, 2005.

The project will reconstruct changes in population, settlement, and landscape use over the past c. 300 years on the islands of Westray, Papa Westray, Sanday, North Ronaldsay, Eday, and Pharay, the northernmost of the Orkney Islands, located off the northern tip of Scotland.  The project, which combines elements of historical demography, ethnology, and archaeology, aims to link demographic information from censuses, vital registers, and cemetery headstones to a large-scale GIS database that maps old farm buildings and field systems onto environmental features such as soil types, water sources, elevation, surface drainage, common grazing lands, and sites providing access to marine resources.

Living community members, especially the elderly, will be interviewed to help document and interpret changes over the past several decades.  Finally, family histories, diaries, account books, leases, field maps, and other old documents will be examined where available.  This project will be the first ever to combine the analytical methods of historical demography with the field-based approaches of household ecology, settlement archaeology, and landscape history.

Each summer, starting about the fourth week of May, students will spend a total of eight weeks in Orkney, including one week of orientation and training, six weeks of actual fieldwork, and a final week to coordinate and analyze the field material, discuss findings, and show the student participants how future research will build upon their work. 

Undergraduate participants will be given an opportunity to take part in all phases of the project on a rotating basis.  Thus, each student will have a chance to help survey and map farm structures and field systems using Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, code and analyze historical demographic data, and participate in conducting, transcribing and coding interviews with living informants.  In addition, students will be working with the Westray Buildings Preservation Trust to document, map, and begin restoring the abandoned croft complex of South Hammer, which was recently purchased by the Trust. 

As the project progresses, undergraduate participants will take part in the analysis and write-up of all the data collected, and they will be invited to be co-authors on any resulting publications wherever appropriate.  All undergraduate work will be supervised by faculty mentors and trained graduate students, but the participants will be encouraged to take increasing responsibility for their own work as their skills increase.

A virtue of the project from the undergraduate’s point of view is that it is an exercise in general anthropology, combining approaches and techniques from ethnology, archaeology, and biological anthropology (specifically population biology).  In our experience, most undergraduate anthropology majors have not yet decided which subdiscipline to specialize in, in large part because they have not had an opportunity to do real field research in all three areas.  The North Orkney Population History Project has been conceived from the outset as an integrated scientific study of the “total” demographic anthropology of a well-defined island community.