Led by Professor Chris Smout, Professor Emeritus in History at St Andrews University and Historiographer Royal in Scotland.

A good deal is known about fishing since the 1800s, and most of the artefacts in the museum relate to this later period. But relatively little is known about fishing and trade from the East Neuk and the rest of Fife before 1840, though there are quite extensive records from the sixteenth century onwards, some of them foreign. This project is aimed at studying published and unpublished documents of this earlier period. Help from interested members of the public would be much welcomed, but please note that many of the manuscripts are in Edinburgh.