Edinburgh University holds a manuscript known as the “Dunkeld Music Book”, a rare witness to the kinds of sacred music that were being sung in Scotland on the eve of the Reformation. The Dunkeld Music Book is especially valuable because it contains several unica (pieces found in no other source). However, the manuscript is incomplete: one whole volume is missing, and the rest have lost several pages. In this talk, Paul Newton-Jackson shows how musicologists approach the problem of reconstructing pieces of music which are preserved incomplete. Using three examples from the Dunkeld Music Book (which will be on display during the talk), Paul explores the challenges and ambiguities of making centuries-old music performable again, and sets out some reasons why this is an important and worthwhile endeavour. Attendees interested in hearing the results of Paul’s reconstructions are also invited to a free concert at Old Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church, at 8pm on Saturday 14th March.

Paul Newton-Jackson is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Leuven in Belgium, and a member of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Historical Reconstruction Research. His study and facsimile edition of the Dunkeld Music Book will be published later this year by Alamire Academic Press.

The event will be held in the CRC Collections Space at the Centre for Research Collections, on the 6th Floor of the Main Library. If you do not have a university staff or student card make yourself known to the library security team who will have a list of those registered on Eventbrite and will let you through the gate.

register here

If you are interested in labwork and environmental archaeology, please sign up for this hands-on workshop on Archaeobotany. You will learn how we sample, process and collect ancient plant remains and how we study them in the lab. You will also get an insight in how these organic remains become preserved in the archaeological record without (much) decay. Archaeobotanical analysis informs us about how people used plants in the past, how they gathered or grew them for food or processed them for making things or building houses. This will help us to understand and reconstruct human-environment relationships and how the people of the past explored and exploited what grew around them. The material can also help us to establish chronologies for sites using radiocarbon dating. Meeting the professionals will also give you an insight into career paths in archaeological post-excavation work.

We will look at charred plant remains, such as cereals, charcoal or weed seeds as well as ancient wood preserved by waterlogging. You will learn about the basic methods of selection and identification, using visual inspection and microscope study.