MSRG Committee Member
Sarah Jane is a lecturer at the University of the Highlands and Islands’ Archaeology Institute in Orkney where she has worked since 2006 after completing her PhD also at the UHI. She lectures in historical archaeology and early medieval archaeology at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Sarah Jane’s research focuses on medieval and later Orkney in its North Atlantic context, particularly the development and mapping of landscapes in the medieval earldoms of Orkney and Caithness, including the lifecycles of townships and parishes, ecclesiastical, secular, lordly and judicial landscapes, memorialisation and veneration. In recent years she has extended her research to include early modern trade in the Northern Isles as PI of the Looking in from the Edge Project (Looking in from the Edge (LIFTE) – Archaeology Orkney.
She uses a multi-disciplinary methodology combining archaeological evidence, place-names, history and literature to research past landscapes. Sarah Jane is co-director of Landscapes of Change: Archaeologies of the Rousay Clearances and the Westness Estate (Research projects – Landscapes of Change: Archaeologies of the Rousay Clearances & the Westness Estate and as such has been excavating a medieval and later rural settlement in the Orkney island of Rousay for the past 10 years.
Medieval Settlement Research Group 