Excavated material will be processed in Castletown's new lab. © Castletown Heritage Society

A new community-owned archaeological research facility at Castletown in Caithness, Scotland, has been opened.

Castlehill Archaeology Research Laboratory has been developed by the Castletown Heritage Society (CHS) with the financial support of the European Fund and Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) (Caithness and Sutherland).

Castletown, located on the most northerly coast of mainland Scotland, has long been associated with the quarrying and exporting of flagstone paving. However it also has a richly diverse social and archaeological heritage, which the CHS hopes to preserve.

Materials from excavations will be processed at the new facility, which forms part of the River of Stone programme - a project formed by the combined efforts of AOC Archaeology Group and Caithness Archaeological Trust in order to encourage regional economic benefit from the archaeology of Caithness.

The facility, located in the former Castlefield farm steading, was opened by Miss Anne Dunnett, Lord Lieutenant of the County on Thursday April 24 2008.

In order to maintain the facility’s community appeal, local people will be able to receive training in archaeological work, as well as in the processing of materials, whether they be excavations from within the River of Stone programme, or independent from it.

Two full-time jobs and one part-time have been created by AOC Archaeology Group at the new facility, designed to enable local graduates to work on materials excavated from sites all over the UK.

“This region has so much first class archaeology," said John Barber, Managing Director of AOC Archaeology Group. "By working with the Caithness Archaeological Trust and local communities we can promote more sites and simultaneously provide training and educational opportunities."

"This will enable us to extend the very successful work we have carried out in the last three years with the community at Spittal, to other parts of the region.”

The processing work to be carried out at the new Castletown facility will involve wet sieving, the sorting of archaeological samples and documentation of the results.

The materials will then be dispatched for expert analysis, which will mainly take place at universities and museums in the UK, although staff will be trained to undertake some routine laboratory analysis.

The first materials to be processed at the facility will be a collection of soil samples from the programme of broch* excavation along Sinclair Bay, which was undertaken by the National Museum of Scotland, Nottingham University and AOC Archaeology Group.

*A broch is a stone tower-like conical structure, generally around 15 metres high, which can be found in Scotland.

Find out more about Castletown Heritage Society on the website www.castletownheritage.co.uk and the work of AOC Archaeology at www.aocarchaeology.com.