Dr Colin Martin
Maritime Landscapes: an interdisciplinary approach
To be effective landscape studies
should be inter-disciplinary, and no single discipline should predominate. By
way of testing this hypothesis the
Centre for Environmental History at the University of St Andrews has launched
an initiative called HITME - History in the Maritime Environment. It seeks to
explore the concept of maritime landscapes through three distinct research strands,
each of which could be studied in isolation although each has the potential
of complementing and informing the others. The first strand involves the investigation
of historic shipwrecks as paradigms of their wider worlds, and is focussed particularly
on current archaeological work on the wreck of the Swan (1653) in the Sound
of Mull. A second strand is assessing the Sound of Mull as a discrete maritime
landscape through physical survey, the classification of monuments, and geological/environmental/historical
study. The final strand explores the concept of trans-oceanic landscapes, which
are essentially cognitive and perceptual ones, through a case-study of Scottish
maritime trade in Europe during the later seventeenth century. Work in all these
areas will lead to specific research outcomes but they will also, it is hoped,
help to establish interactive methodologies with wider applications elsewhere.