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‘Every year it astounds us’: the Orkney dig uncovering Britain’s stone age culture
Archaeologists excavating the windswept Ness of Brodgar are unearthing a treasure trove of neolithic villages, tombs, weapons and mysterious religious artefacts, some to be displayed in a blockbuster exhibition
If you happen to imagine that there’s not much left to discover of Britain’s stone age, or that its relics consist of hard-to-love postholes and scraps of bones, then you need to find your way to Orkney, that scatter of islands off Scotland’s north-east coast. On the archipelago’s Mainland, out towards the windswept west coast with its wave-battered cliffs, you will come to the Ness of Brodgar, an isthmus separating a pair of sparkling lochs, one of saltwater and one of freshwater. Just before the way narrows you’ll see the Stones of Stenness rising up before you. This ancient stone circle’s monoliths were once more numerous, but they remain elegant and imposing. Like a gateway into a liminal world of theatricality and magic, they lead the eye to another, even larger neolithic monument beyond the isthmus, elevated in the landscape as if on a stage. This is the Ring of Brodgar, its sharply individuated stones like giant dancers arrested mid-step – as local legend, indeed, has it.
It’s between these two stone circles that archaeologist Nick Card and his team are excavating a huge settlement of neolithic stone buildings. The earliest date from about 3300BC, their walls and hearths crisply intact, their pots and stone tools in remarkable profusion, the whole bounded by six-metre-wide monumental walls. “You could continue for several lifetimes and not get to the bottom of it,” says the neatly white-bearded, laconic Card as we gaze out over the site, presently covered with tarpaulin to protect it from the winter storms. “Every year it never fails to produce something that astounds us.” After nearly two decades of digging, they have excavated only about 10% of its area, and about 5% of its volume. It goes deep: buildings are stacked on the ruins of older ones; the place was in use for 1,000 years. When summer comes, they’ll dig again. When the coverings come off each July, says Card’s colleague, Anne Mitchell, “down you go and you’re among the ghosts of the past”.
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