It's time we got back to some proper history! I want to draw attention to the latest archaeology in Orkney. Remember my perennial health warning, never take anything I say as definitive truth, research always alters the view and conclusions. We have a good example in the Orkney archipelago. Current excavations on the Ness of Brodgar are throwing up some surprising facts.
Regular readers will perhaps remember me writing about the settlement at Skara Brae with its surprisingly sophisticated household furnishings, beds, sideboards and cupboards all made out of the flat stones which are readily found in the area due to the geology and the beautiful regular stone walls. These new excavations at Brodgar are revealing well built houses with carbon dates from the lower layers putting occupation back at least as far as 3,500BC. This is when we think the culture of farming spread to the Isles and from the evidence it appears as though these most Northerly inhabitants were in the forefront of 'modernisation'. This applies also to the numerous stone burial mounds and circles on the archipelago. The researchers are getting very excited because this activity was 500 years before the oldest known similar sites in England and 1,000 years before Stonehenge.
The thesis they are putting forwards is that Orkney was the 'capital' of late Neolithic culture in Britain which is intriguing but I think at the moment we have to take this with a pinch of salt. This assumes that we know definitively that there is nothing this early further South. I have been banging on for years about early settlement in Barlick. We have clear evidence which puts us back to around 2,500BC but this is based on what exists above ground and is visible without digging. I have little doubt that if resources similar to those being deployed in Orkney could be transferred to Barlick we would get similar surprises. What is certainly true (and you can trust this general observation) is that the more we look, the more we find. The recent LIDAR survey of the area has demonstrated exactly that, we have been walking about for years on evidence of settlements we never knew existed. Who can say what would be found?
My own view is that given our present knowledge, the late Stone Age inhabitants of Barlick were far smarter that the 19th century antiquarians thought and given this we should not exclude the possibility that there was even earlier settlement than we know at the present. I find it intriguing to bear this in mind when I walk round the modern town. We are the inheritors of a very ancient landscape and the cultures that went with it. To put it in context, we are talking about organised settlement 1000 years before the Pyramids at Giza. So my message is to let your mind roam free and allow yourself to imagine the view down the corridors of the millennia. Human beings exactly like us were living their lives in Barlick 5,000 years ago.
The Stone Age furniture at Skara Brae.
