Transcript: Jane Downes VFT 2: The Heart of Neolithic Orkney



Question 3: Although the World heritage status relates specifically to the Neolithic remains, the archaeological landscape is clearly multi-period. What do we know about the Bronze Age landscapes that fall within the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site?The Bronze Age of Orkney is really quite poorly understood. We have the splendours of Late Neolithic architecture and monuments and the Bronze Age itself has been written about as a time of poverty, recession and insularity. It’s just because there’s obviously great changes in society and in the way that they create their landscapes and their architecture but that doesn’t necessarily translate to impoverishment.The most obvious form of monument relating to the Bronze Age here in the World Heritage Site as well as elsewhere in Britain is of course the Bronze Age borrows or burial mounds and many of them can be seen around the Ring of Brodgar itself. These are grouped as barrows are around Stone Henge where they seem to focus and cluster around the stone circle, although interestingly they don’t seem to focus around and cluster around the stones of Stenness. Even though there’s been a lot of ploughing there in the geophysical survey we’re undertaken and in the records there aren’t traces of barrows clustering around the stones of Stenness. It is Brodgar that seems to be the focus of the remains of the dead. The barrows are present on the edge of the Ring of Brodgar; there are little rows of them in the fields around the Ring of Brodgar. And then, as you move up the hill, towards the Booken area, there are many different barrows as well. There’s a disc barrow which is more commonly found around Stone Henge so we’re getting the type of ‘fancy’ burial mounds that are found in Wessex and that gives us some more connection between the Wessex area and the late Neolithic and Bronze Age of Orkney.Many of the barrows of course have been excavated in the past, and the barrows around the Ring of Brodgar are no different and when you’re at the Ring of Brodgar looking around you can see that typical profile of the barrows: where they look like a boiled egg with the top taken off them, where antiquarians have dug into the top of them. There are records of what has been found in some of the barrows but not all and that’s a little frustrating but excavation that’s been undertaken by myself on other barrow cemetery sites that antiquarians have excavated shows in fact you can still regain a lot of evidence from these monuments even they’ve been dug into in the past because of course they were asking different questions from the ones we’re asking when we excavate today. So, there is in fact a Bronze Age house which is an upstanding monument just outside the boundary of the World Heritage Site but within the buffer zone and this is at Wasbister. This shows up, you can see it in the field, as quite a big earthen bank in circular form which shows us that this is one of those big double-houses. So what we know about Bronze Age architecture for houses is that in Orkney and in Shetland typically you’d have two houses linked together with entrances facing each other. So they created one house and then at some period later, have created another one so they’re conjoined. Unlike the Neolithic settlement (in the Late Neolithic) which is more like a village group, such as at Skara Brae, these houses tend to be in pairs and more distributed through the landscape. This is typical of Bronze Age settlement, where we know the character of it elsewhere in Britain, the settlement and agriculture seems to extensify throughout the landscape possibly relating to increasing sheep rearing and the way that they use the landscape for grazing.So we have this double-house at Wasbister and it relates also to the barrows within its same field and we have a small barrow that sits just uphill from Wasbister and almost undoubtedly relates to that settlement. When we undertook geophysics in the area across Brodgar and Wasbister, which we have of course undertaken across the whole of the World Heritage Site and in the buffer zone, we see that the area of the barrows around the Ring of Brodgar and in the Ring of Brodgar itself is very ‘quiet’ in terms of geophysical anomalies so all we’re seeing standing out are the barrows themselves. So it would appear that there’s not a lot of other evidence relating to either to the Neolithic or the Bronze Age in fact around the Ring of Brodgar apart from these burial mounds. When we look at the area of Wasbister we can see that not only is there the house that’s upstanding we can still see as an earthen monument but also there are indications that there are other houses as well there. So it’s a very exciting discovery that we found a Bronze Age settlement with this paired house that’s still standing and traces of other houses as well in that same area, although not clustered together like the houses at Skara brae. ................
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