Experts in science (chemistry, physics, statistics), heritage science and sensor technology will drive an ambitious but realistic proposal to develop diagnostic olfactory tools for heritage science. The new devices will be non-invasive, non-contact, portable and simple to use providing real-time data; making them well suited to address cultural heritage questions and survey collections, particularly for objects where potential hazards, access issues or sampling restrictions have precluded study to date. Implementation of energy efficient sensors to tackle heritage problems (rather than large equipment) will also help reduce the U.K.'s environmental footprint. Indeed, there is an overall lack of capacity in the heritage sector both in organic material analysis and volatile organic compound (VOC) monitoring; this research addresses such issues.\n\nBy merely 'sniffing' the air, questions regarding the environmental and conservation history, composition, condition or stability of objects will be answered. This will empower collections custodians and allow informed decisions about the acquisition, storage, conservation, display and long-term preservation of items, whilst also ensuring the health of those accessing public and private collections. \n\nThree key interconnected challenges have been identified where timely research will give the UK a leading position providing new knowledge, expertise and technical developments, informing practitioners in heritage-user defined problem areas. \n\n1: The past use of hazardous chemicals to disinfect/disinfest objects presents risks to those handling or accessing objects. Within this challenge objects will be 'sniffed' to determine if they have undergone such treatments. The data will allow informed conservation /research decisions regarding handling, display, loan and access. Key deliverables include: improvement of scholarly, public and native community use and engagement with cultural heritage and collection preservation, and development of new knowledge data bases that will be used to train portable sensing systems designed for high-throughput object screening.\n\n2: Since the beginning of last century observation and analyses have established that paper is unstable. A by-product of the deterioration process is the production of VOCs. In this challenge a well characterized set of papers will be 'sniffed' to identify target indicators that imply paper instability. A key deliverable will be the development and application of non-invasive portable sampling tools for paper-based collections that can be used to provide rapid on-site analysis of stability and risk. \n\n3: Heritage institutions are continually acquiring objects that contain synthetic, complex and inherently unstable modern materials. The composition and condition of such objects are extremely difficult to characterise and assess. A unique approach will be taken to tackle this problem: measurement of VOCs emitted by modern materials. The data will be used to inform heritage users of object composition and materials instability; interpretation of 'object smell' has not previously been exploited in this way. A key deliverable is development of a new tool for the identification of modern materials at risk allowing mitigation methods to be implemented to retard chemical and/or biological deterioration.\n\nThis proposal therefore seeks to develop VOC sampling tools to address these challenges without the need for complex or costly instrumentation. Indeed very few heritage institutions have access to laboratory equipment and such studies are impossible to implement. The outcome of this research (development of hand held portable low cost sensors) will be of wide benefit to heritage-users and open the research door to thousands of smaller institutions (museums, galleries, libraries, historic houses) and private collectors.\n

The art market and its practices has attracted increasing attention from academics in recent years, it also continues to fascinate the general public. Within the broader structures of the art market 'antiques' remains an immensely popular subject, with TV programmes such as the 'Antiques Roadshow' regularly in the top viewing figures and one cannot ignore the scores of other programmes from 'Bargain Hunt' to 'Lovejoy' that reveal, and mythologise, the practices of the antique trade and the figure of the antique dealer. And yet the history of the antique trade, an awareness of its practices, and a clear understanding of the role of the antique trade in the complex and shifting landscape of our fascination with antiques remains an obscure and little understood cultural phenomenon. In the museum world, the history of antique dealers in the biography of museum objects has often been supressed or dislocated from the interpretation of museum objects in the public domain. The proposed 'Year of the Dealer' project aims to direct renewed attention to the history of the antique trade in the development of public museums and the significance of the antique trade in British cultural life. The project is based on the AHRC research project 'Antique Dealers: the British Antique Trade in the 20th century, a cultural geography' (2013-2016) and draws on the rich research resources that the project assembled, including 36 oral history interviews (more than 100 hours of archive), 8 major dealer archives and an active community of more than 30 volunteers working on data input into the project websites and on cataloguing and conservation of dealer archives. The 'Year of the Dealer' aims to co-produce innovative museum interpretation materials, to engage stakeholders in the themes that have emerged as a result of the research project and to disseminate and embed key research findings in the wider public domain. We aim to reveal the potential for new and previously hidden stories to be told about world-renowned and familiar museum objects and to demonstrate the potential for the adoption of the new narratives in public museum interpretation on a national and international scale. Over the course of one year the project team and the well established community of project volunteers will work in collaboration with 6 national and regional museums (The V&A, National Museum, Scotland, The Ashmolean Museum, The Lady Lever Art Gallery, The Bowes Museum, and Temple Newsam), a university art gallery, a community theatre and a leading antique dealer business to deliver an innovative programme of museum interpretation interventions, exhibitions, workshops and public events, training workshops and a high profile theatre performance. The project outcomes will include 6 individual 'hidden history' trails of up to 20 objects in the collections of major museum partners; a series of 4 individually designed workshops based on key questions that have emerged on the relationships between museums and the art market, co-produced with museum partners; a series of 3 public engagement 'In Conversation' events at 3 of the partner museums; staff and volunteer training workshops at each partner museum; a small-scale 3 month exhibition reuniting dealer archives with museum objects and an associated archives workshop; a high-profile, public performance of the play 'Quinneys', led by student actors and directed by a leading academic in theatre directing; an associated participatory workshop, led by a leading academic in theatre and performance; both play and workshop foreground themes of which are central to the construction of the social and cultural identity of the antique dealer. This rich series of activities, managed and disseminated through a dedicated project website, aims to facilitate a permanent shift in the potential for new interpretations of public museum objects and engage a variety of stakeholders and the public in the results of the research project

The AHRC-funded project 'Diaspora Representation in UK Gardens, Libraries, Archives and Museums: Exploring Community-Led Collections-Based Research' will commence in September 2021, led by Dr John Giblin (National Museums Scotland) and Dr Robert Blyth (National Maritime Museum). This project will study collections-based participatory research methods with a range of community groups and Gardens, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs) to inform best practice and increase EDI in the UK sector. For this pilot phase, the project will work with South Asian, African and African Caribbean Diaspora community groups in partnership with GLAMs. Diaspora community groups will direct research design, implementation and production of creative outputs using relevant historic and contemporary collections, including those collected as part of British imperial activity. Individual projects will explore and represent the multiplicity of experiences of empire, migration and life in Britain and in so doing will challenge and enhance established representations. Through this work, the project will also explore the relevance of world history collections and museum engagements for Diaspora communities. The project will follow a Hub and Spoke model. National Museums Scotland (NMS) and the National Maritime Museum (NMM) will act as the Hub gathering and evaluating evidence, providing museum expert guidance, and holding a central fund that will be distributed to GLAM Spoke partners' Diaspora-led projects. The project will foster greater cross-sector collaboration, build capacity, and co-produce a range of creative outputs. It will prioritise gathering and sharing evidence on best practice in co-creation and co-participation in heritage and culture research, specifically through surfacing polyphonic voices and diverse narratives from across communities and supporting GLAM organisations to engage with them for mutual benefit. This will be achieved through the longitudinal evaluation work shared through a public facing legacy document and through a sector knowledge-sharing event, which will present knowledge from co-creation and co-participation for more nuanced public and sector debate.

Recent historic events in the Outer Hebrides have provided a new and hitherto unparalleled context to address the academic issue of knowledge transfer and archival research potential in partnership with community cultural custodians. As the result of a successfully negotiated 'community buyout' of the lands and assets of South Uist Estates (the biggest in Scotland under the Scottish Parliament's land legislation), the island communities of South Uist, Benbecula and Eriskay, through Stòras Uibhist, their community company, entered 2007 with all the physical and cultural resources of their islands in community ownership. Community leadership has identified that transfer of ownership of both the physical and cultural resources requires strategic development both by way of necessity, as well as in response to the potential to 'grow' the wealth.\nCulture resources are arguably only ever 'on loan' to any generation and it is incumbent on a people to make good their custodianship. Local historical societies, island cultural organisations, and cultural entrepreneurs are acutely aware of the value of what they hold in trust. With the new ownership status, however, the community is presenting itself as open to collaboration to ensure this worth is not only more fully appreciated but also made more accessible (and sustainable) in a current digital age. \nThree workshop events held on South Uist are proposed. The central theme is of knowledge transfer opportunities for Island Cultural Archives. Keynote addresses will be made on each of the three themed events (Oral Tradition; Deserted Settlement; Visual Legacies), and offer focus for the various community archives. The workshops participants are drawn from museums and archive staff and custodians, community cultural organisations and academics from a range of disciplinary fields. \nIn Workshop One the participants will examine the research potential of the 'Oral Tradition' with particular reference to the Gaelic music and song heritage of the islands. This is perhaps the most 'established' cultural resource arena for the place and as such it presents a rich seam of activity, debate and practice. One area for exploration relates to the capturing of contemporary creative activity and working with digital media possibilities for a 'heritage in the making'.\nIn Workshop Two, the focus will shift to the crucial socio-political arena of 'settlement'. The theme of 'Deserted Settlement' presents an opportunity to relate archival records, and museum artefacts, to living memories. This is a particularly exciting area for development as the digital media technologies offer new opportunities to the community to identify, record, and reflect on their history and culture. Implicit in this agenda is the current 'settlement' challenges to small island and remote communities in retaining, and welcoming, residents and raises interesting questions for how academic and media practice expertise can contribute to the wider debate on rural and island life. This is of special importance in terms of the 'new community ownership' status of the islands in question.\nWorkshop Three, 'Visual Legacies', explores visual archives within the Outer Hebrides: paintings, still photography, creative and documentary film, and community activity recordings. This theme brings together academic partners who are leaders in this field and offers a highly engaging arena for ongoing and new partnership.\nAs an innovative development in the nature of community and academic relations for the area this project could provide a template for further application in similar situations. Specifically, should the findings suggest a demand for greater HEI community interface (and all preliminary indications are good) via archives such as estate papers and visual texts, further research projects on South Uist and similar island communities are envisaged.

This project will shed light on a key stage in the evolution of life on Earth. The advent onto land of limbed vertebrates (tetrapods) was an event that shaped the future evolution of the planet, including the appearance of humans. The process began about 360 million years ago, during the late Palaeozoic, in the early part of the Carboniferous Period. Within the 20 million years that followed, limbed vertebrates evolved from their essentially aquatic and fish-like Devonian predecessors into fully terrestrial forms, radiating into a wide range of body forms that occupied diverse habitats and ecological niches. We know this because we have an adequate fossil record of the earliest limbed vertebrates from the Late Devonian, contrasting with the terrestrial forms that lived significantly later in the Early Carboniferous, about 340 million years ago. It is also clear that a mass extinction event occurred at the end of the Devonian, following which life on land and in fresh water habitats had to be re-established. Unfortunately, the formative 20 million years from the end of Devonian times has remained almost unrepresented for fossil tetrapods and their arthropod contemporaries. Thus, we know little about how tetrapods evolved adaptations for life on land, the environments in which they did so, and the timing or sequence of these events. The evolutionary relationships among these early tetrapods and how they relate to modern forms are also unclear and controversial as a result of this lack of fossil information. The entire fossil hiatus has been called 'Romer's Gap' after the American palaeontologist who first recognized it. Now, for the first time anywhere in the world, several fossil localities representing this period have been discovered in south-eastern Scotland. They have already provided a wealth of new fossils of tetrapods, fish, invertebrates and plants, and our team is the first to have the opportunity to study this material and the environmental, depositional, and climatic context in which this momentous episode took place. We have a number of major aims. The existing fossil material will form a baseline for this study, but the project will augment this by further excavating the richest of the sites so far found and subjecting it to a detailed archaeological-style analysis. We will collect from other recently recognized sites and explore for further sites with relevant potential. The fossil material will be described and analysed using a range of modern techniques to answer many questions related to the evolution of the animals and plants. Not only that, using stratigraphical, sedimentological, palynological, geochemical and isotopic data, we will establish the conditions of deposition that preserved the fossils, the environments in which the organisms lived and died, and the precise times at which they did so. We will drill a borehole that will core through the entire geological formation in which these fossils have been found. Using this, we will integrate data from our fossil sites using the signals provided by the sedimentary record to build a detailed time line showing in which horizons the fossils were found, the age of each occurrence and their sequential relationship. We will compare and correlate our data with that from contemporaneous deposits in Nova Scotia, the only other locality with information sufficiently rich to be meaningful. Our data will allow us to infer changes to the environment and the evolutionary trajectories of the animals and plants during the deposition of this formation, covering the 20 million years following the end-Devonian mass extinction. Comparison with similar data for the Late Devonian will allow us to chart the changes around the time of the mass extinction, to infer its causes and consequences, and obtain a detailed record of exactly how changes to the environment correlated with changes to the fauna and flora.