Our PhD students Kath Page and Adam Markham led a session for the 2025 Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities (SGSAH) summer school at the Advance Research Centre at Glasgow University last week. They joined other PhD students, researchers and lecturers from the Universities of Stirling, Glasgow and Strathclyde, and Glasgow School of Arts.
Their session, on June 24, was entitled Anthropocentrism and Archaeology: Understanding human-animal relationships in the past to inform the present. It was a hybrid event, with Adam dialling in from Connecticut, on the east coast of the USA, and Kath leading the session in person. In attendance were PhD students from the universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews, and from the Centre of Mountains studies, Perth UHI.
Over the course of the afternoon, the interactive session considered the role of Arts and Humanities in challenging anthropocentrism and the nature-culture divide within PhD research and outside of academia.
The second part of the session focused on how zooarchaeological methods and practice – especially social zooarchaeology – can provide a deep-time approach to understanding past human-animal relationships. This is crucial if we are to engage in interdisciplinary discourse around the current ethical considerations placed on certain species and the effect human exceptionalism is having on species and the environment as climate change and accelerates and and habitat loss grows.
Adam is undertaking a part-time PhD at the UHI Archaeology Institute, his project being Understanding mind, economy and social transitions in the Viking Age and Late Norse British Isles through the use and meaning of birds.
Kath is a full-time, SGSAH funded PhD student, her research titled “The deer turn: an archaeological case study approach to reimaging dualistic ontologies of human-red deer relationships in Scottish prehistory.
Find out more about our research degrees here and follow Adam and Kath on Bluesky: @adammarkham.bsky.social and @orkat3.bsky.social
We’d be delighted to hear from anyone considering a self-funded MRes or PhD. Our research themes and topics are outlined here and if any of those are of interest, contact Professor Jane Downes for more information.
