The fellowship offers a unique opportunity to engage with some of Scotland's largest and most influential heritage organisations on a topic with heightened visibility in public discourse about heritage, but near invisibility in sector's workforce. The recent public engagement with the Black Lives Matter movement has forced many of us to consider race in a more meaningful way. Too often this is side-lined because the discussions are uncomfortable and at times the terminology and expression of related issues is unfamiliar, but it is a reality that cannot be ignored or overlooked any more. If we fail to confront the issues facing us, we will do lasting disservice to the communities in which we live. Serious and problematic questions have been asked about the foundations of the society we live in; the people we choose to commemorate and why; and what we can do. We cannot change the past, but we can change our understanding of the past and what aspects of that past we choose to celebrate, commemorate, or even simply acknowledge. This goes far beyond race as it intersects also with issues of gender and class and asks further uncomfortable questions about what we perceive to be heritage in the Scottish context? Do we prioritise the medieval past, glorying in castles, kings and queens, while ignoring the industrial landscape and heritage of coalmines? Why do we still feel it necessary to remember Henry Dundas with a statue, an individual whose 'gradualist' move towards support for the abolition of slavery enabled his colleagues in the West Indies to shore up their financial position in the face of such change? At what point will the Heritage industry acknowledge fully the legacy of trans-Atlantic slavery in Scotland; or the working-class areas of Scotland that shaped the Industrial Revolution? This fellowship will work from the inside out by engaging with some of the key organisations involved in decision making about heritage in Scotland.

Archaeological investigation is a crucial component of infrastructure projects (including rail, road, airports, energy and aggregates), employing hundreds of archaeologists from across the EU. In the UK over £200m will be spent by government on archaeology within infrastructure projects in the period 2018-2022. Europe-wide, the infrastructure spend on archaeology will be at least £1.5billion. The hundreds of millions invested in the field of development-led archaeology are audited as part of the construction process, but the question of public benefit and value has not been audited in the same way. There are no consistent, transparent criteria for assessing the knowledge generated, or the social, cultural and economic benefits delivered through this archaeology, despite the fact that the historic environment has untapped potential to improve social cohesion and tackle inequalities through knowledge creation and participatory action research. Crucial to the sustainability of the fragmented archaeological profession is the effective and relevant communication of results to a variety of audiences, but appropriate methods and innovative solutions are often instigated on an ad hoc basis and their relative success are not evaluated. This Future Leaders Fellowship project led by Dr Sadie Watson will have the long-term aim of developing systems that allow benefit to be measured across infrastructure schemes and in doing so to transform the outputs from these programmes of archaeological work, helping to deliver knowledge that is relevant, creative and digitally accessible to a wider range of audiences. The UK has the potential to be a world leader in this area. The Fellowship project will undertake a review of existing systems already in place for measuring impact and outcomes across the creative and cultural sectors, sciences and business to identify cross-discipline techniques. The project will consult at different scales - across the archaeology sector, HEIs, government, the public (engaged and not yet engaged audiences) and creative industries to understand which new outputs will deliver the greatest impact. The Fellowship project will study comparator international projects, where infrastructure spending has impacted upon archaeology, and review their success. The research will identify and design consistent and transparent systems that provide frameworks for assessing the social, economic and cultural benefits of archaeological work conducted as part of infrastructure development, and qualitatively improve the relevance and usefulness of knowledge generated through this archaeological work. Resulting guidance will enable standardised and sustainable cultural auditing of the impact of this archaeological work. It will provide a clear set of bespoke recommendations for future projects to enhance policy at central and local levels, and to improve project design, ensuring that the societal impact of archaeological knowledge and experience is considered throughout. It will encourage innovation in the planning, implementation and dissemination of archaeological projects, and collaboration across sectors to increase participation in archaeology, encourage participants in archaeological projects associated with infrastructure (both professional and voluntary) to engage in reflective practice, assessing their own roles and contributions, and encourage participation in archaeology amongst previously under-represented audiences, through innovative engagement methods.

The project addresses the practical problems of how to undertake robust social cost benefit analysis (CBA) for Culture and heritage capital (CHC) and how to apply and adapt accounting principles for sustainable management of CHC. CHC and Natural capital (NC) are intermingled across the English landscape. Existing approaches for valuing natural capital from the environmental economics literature likely subsume the value of CHC service flows and may compromise policy efficiency by mischaracterizing trade-offs involved in managing natural or CHC. The underlying objective of the project is to 1) Develop CHC valuation methods to be readily applied across a range of assets, and 2) To disentangle assets and services produced and co-produced by CHC and other assets such as NC. The principal output will be an overarching framework for practitioners that will help articulate values and guide decision making. The framework will provide a basis that data and insights from future research can be added to. Our work will develop methodologies and guidance for CHC decision-making and outline the normative criteria for sustainability in terms of these methodologies. Addressing these research problems is essential to improving the joint management of CHC and NC by our partners, realising public benefit, and ensuring socially responsible and people-centred approaches to land management. We will reconcile methodologies currently deployed in existing accounts of CHC flows with those developed and deployed for natural capital (NC) (Bateman et al, 2013;2016). Further, we utilise the infrastructure and connections of National Trust (NT) and Forestry England (FE) to design and implement innovative experimental valuation techniques for separating values, for example for NC and CHC flows, and for physical verses digital CHC assets. This will provide a robust and novel expansion of monetary estimates for CHC value flows. In recognition of the urgent need for such approaches to support responses to increasing pressures for land use change, development, climate adaptation and other drivers this approach will ensure immediate impact on practice with findings reported to policy makers (DCMS, Defra and their public bodies) as the work unfolds. Early deliverables to support sector understanding and application of CHC will include publishing introductory guidance, valuation and accounting methodologies guidance and metrics for monitoring and demonstrating benefit flows and change. To support the sector wide adoption of metrics and enable CHC to be made visible and integrated into existing decision support tools, data layers for baseline CHC will be developed and made publicly available. Subsequent deliverables include new value estimates from our experiments, illustrative case study based CHC accounts, technical guidance, and the dissemination of outputs through conferences, webinars, briefing notes for practitioners and journal publications.

This project will increase the knowledge about, and build transferable expertise in, the remote sensing (RS) of archaeological residues (AR). Current archaeological RS techniques have evolved with variable understanding of the physical, chemical, biological and environmental processes involved. Thus current detection strategies do not allow systematic AR assessment leading to sub-optimal heritage management and development control. This project will focus on analysing the physical and environmental factors that influence AR contrast dynamics with the overall aim of improving site and feature detection.\n\nArchaeological RS techniques rely on the ability of a sensor to detect the contrast between an AR and its immediate surroundings or matrix. AR detection is influenced by many factors - changes in precipitation, temperature, crop stress/type, soil type and structure and land management techniques. These factors vary seasonally and diurnally, meaning that the ability to detect an AR with a specific sensor changes over time.\n\nWithout understanding the processes that affect the visibility and detection of ARs (directly and by proxy), prospection techniques will remain somewhat ad-hoc and opportunistic. Enhanced knowledge of ARs is important in the long-term curation of a diminishing heritage and will provide cost savings to operational works (through more effective mitigation). This is important in environments where traditional optical aerial photography has been unresponsive (e.g pasture and clay soils).\n\nThe project is timely considering the recent development of high spatial and spectral resolution ground, air and satellite sensors.\nThe project involves 4 stages:\n1 Identifying appropriate candidate sites and sampling methodology\n2 Field measurements and collecting and analysing field samples from sites under different conditions\n3 Physical modelling, feedback, knowledge articulation\n4 Evaluation\nSites will be chosen on the basis of contrasting ARs, soil and land management conditions etc. Close liaison with curatorial agencies (with excavation data) is necessary to ensure a representative range of AR types is identified. It will be important to include sites with varying environmental conditions and AR types (buried soils, 'negative' features such as ditches, buried masonry and surface materials).\n\nTo determine contrast factors strategic samples and measurements will be taken on and around the AR at different times of the day and year to ensure that a representative range of conditions is covered. Field measurements will include geophysical and hyperspectral surveys, thermal profiling, soil moisture and spectral reflectance. Laboratory analysis of samples will include geochemistry and particle size.\n\nModels will be developed that translate these physical values into spectral, magnetic, electrical and acoustic measures in order to determine contrast parameters. Data fusion and knowledge reasoning techniques will be used to develop management tools to improve the programming of surveys. These tools will be used to deploy sensors, including aerial hyperspectral devices, for evaluation purposes.\n\nIn summary, this project will impact on and develop:\n1 Baseline understanding and knowledge about AR contrast processes and preservation dynamics:\n a. leading to better management and curation\n b. providing data to model environmental impact on ARs\n c. enhancing the understanding of the resource base\n2 The identification of suitable sensors and conditions for their use (and feedback to improve sensor design)\n3 Data fusion techniques (physical models, multi-sensor data and domain knowledge) to improve AR identification\n4 An Interdisciplinary network between remote sensing, soil science, computing and heritage professionals\n5 Techniques for researchers to access data archives more effectively\n\nWe believe that the results will have national impact and have the potential for transfer throughout the world.