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This thesis discusses the material histories of stone circles in Scotland to consider the practices that have brought them into being as monuments in the early twenty-first century. Focusing on stone circles in North-East Scotland, this study is the first to examine the influence of the long nineteenth century on current thinking and practices about an important aspect of Scottish prehistory. Cultural historical, archaeological and anthropological approaches provide a framework for the analysis of visitors’ practices between the later eighteenth century and the present. This includes the analysis of the publications and archives of archaeological societies and field clubs, and was complemented by ethnographic fieldwork to investigate current practices and understandings. This took the form of semi-structured interviews with archaeologists, artists and others, participant observation during the excavation of a stone circle in Aberdeenshire, field visits to stone circles elsewhere and a survey in 2006 with questionnaires which were completed by about 700 people, and disposable cameras which were used to take some 300 photographs by visitors. I argue that the analysis of the sensuous experience of being at a stone circle cannot be separated from understandings of the non-material aspects of these sites, particularly ideas of the ‘sacred’, ‘art’ and ‘heritage’, to broaden their biographies beyond that of solely being archaeological monuments. Considering the many different meanings they engender shows that North-East stone circles are not places of contention or conflict, but places where different views are accommodated alongside governmental efforts to manage and interpret them. A particular focus of the thesis is a discussion of how stone circles have been seen and visually recorded. I argue that many aspects of recent views, including photographs by visitors, published photographs and interviews with artists and archaeologists, have been influenced by illustrations and attitudes that developed during the long nineteenth century.

Throughout the thesis I take symbolic communication and visual metaphors as starting points for developing a contemporary picture of diverse Craft practices in a small corner of Scotland.  This thesis is both an ethnography of Craft and a craft object, explicitly made to be a theory-laden object of material culture. This thesis aims to question a variety of epistemological regimes found not only in anthropology but also in the North-East of Scotland.  The main argument of this thesis is that in order to understand something about Craft and the experiences of its makers it is important to have an understanding of the ways in which they create that world as meaningful: that is, an understanding of the thirdness (or symbolism) that is an active, generative force in that world.  In the following chapters I argue two interwoven points: one, that a stash (collection) is a collection of stash (craft materials) and is also a site of thirdness in which symbolic thought and action are vital.  And two: that, as such, stash and the craft world in which it is embedded are well served by an approach to visual anthropology and that takes seriously a study of semiotics in which poetics become more than a subject of analysis; poetics are also allowed to develop into a method(ology) of engaging both informants and audience in a meaningful dialogue of knowledge production. By using images to contextualize ethnographic evidence and by making these previous points not only with words, but also through imagery, I aim to convince the reader of the integrity of my ethnographic analyses as well as that theories of visual anthropology are as useful for analysing anthropological subjects as for communicating ourselves.

No / Mineral waters in Britain show a wide range of 87Sr/86Sr isotope compositions ranging between 87Sr/86Sr = 0.7059 from Carboniferous volcanic rock sources in Dunbartonshire, Scotland to 87Sr/86Sr = 0.7207 in the Dalradian aquifer of Aberdeenshire, Scotland. The 87Sr/86Sr composition of the waters shows a general correlation with the aquifer rocks, resulting in the waters from older rocks having a more radiogenic signature than those from younger rocks. This wide range of values means that the Sr isotope composition of mineral water has applications in a number of types of studies. In the modern commercial context, it provides a way of fingerprinting the various mineral waters and hence provides a method for recognising and reducing fraud. From an environmental perspective, it provides the first spatial distribution of bio-available 87Sr/86Sr in Britain that can be used in modern, historical and archaeological studies