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Waste management and peri-urban agriculture in the early modern Scottish burgh

1 Waste-management and Peri-urban Agriculture in the Early Modern Scottish Burgh Richard D Oram Abstract The deepening of soil for agriculture is a widely-recognised northern European phenomenon. In Scotland, geoarchaeological investigation has identified such anthropogenically deepened soils in urban and rural contexts and interprets them in terms of this northern European tradition, but has not explored the processes behind their formation or the longevity of the practice. While it is well known that Scotland’s medieval town-dwellers grew their dietary staples, their agricultural practices and impact on peri-urban fields has lacked detailed investigation. This paper reviews the geoarchaeological evidence and analyses documentary records from seventeen Scottish burghs, together illustrating a central component of burgess agriculture, the management of urban waste for use as manure. Burgh regulations reveal changing cultural attitudes towards waste as a valued commodity occurring in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as fewer townsmen engaged directly in cultivation, but urban waste nevertheless remained in demand as fertilizer in the hinterland of many Scottish towns into the later nineteenth century.