Transcript: Dr Julie Gibson VFT 2: The Heart of Neolithic
Orkney
Question 2b: What are the main issues surrounding the management of
Skara Brae and the wider archaeological landscape? (continued)
One of the problems we have now, rather than in the future, is that government (that’s local and national)
have basically no, or little, intention in investing in archaeology even where it forms great parts of the
infrastructure for the future unless it can turn round a pretty immediate profit. So, there is a difference in I
think possibly the parts of the organisation that think about profit and the parts that think about curation
which means that you can spend money that appears to be curation in an effort to make a site last longer
and this make an economy more profitable.
You could invest, in contrast, in building a tea room that would immediately turn round a profit on a site,
such as for instance in Stirling Castle. You know, this is money that comes back into the historic
environment through a roundabout route and directly back to Historic Scotland.
So we have some difficulties in deciding who is going to be responsible for something such as the sea wall
because you can’t see an immediate return, although somebody looking at the economy of the area or the
economy of Scotland could see an immediate return in that if Skara Brae goes there are a bunch of visitors
that are not going to be stopping off on those cruise ships that are going around Scotland and if they don’t
stop in Orkney, it makes the whole trip less attractive. So, there’s a whole dose of people who should
invest, yet it was just a few years ago, in discussions still unresolved about how we were going to protect
Skara Brae it was deemed that the cost of a consultancy, a brief consultancy, to look at the sea wall would
be about £8000 and between us, between the council and Historic Scotland, it was never resolved who
would pay for that consultancy and thus [the] consultancy was never done. So, it’s a matter of trying to
create advocacy and structures that can actually respond to need.
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