Orkney Riddler

After my second season at Grimes Graves, in 1974, the director G.de G Sieveking asked for volunteers to work a small excavation he had planned in North London. The place was in Acton, at a school,  the Haberdashers Aske School. The property was changing hands and would become the Japanese School in the new term.  Mr Sieveking had been given permission and support to excavate part of the grounds of the school as it was known that a knapping floor was present in the area yielding an unusual style of knapping technique,  the Levallois technique.  The flints that we were hoping to find were large and sort of triangular. The site of our excavation was just outside the window into the head teacher's office, and as we had not been told about the circumstances of the change of hands of the property it felt slightly sacriligeous to be cutting into turf that we as children, not that long ago, would have been forbidden to walk on. The turf was tidily cut and carefully stacked f...

  Erratic Boulder In Dorset Barrow I explained that Bournemouth, Christchurch, and Poole were all on or near a plateau of gravel. This plateau that must be dated to some time in the last million years has been cut through in many places, and as a result the area is dotted with steep roads. These hilly roads are notorious. Richmond Hill in central Bournemouth, Sea Road in Boscombe, Gravel Hill in Poole. As a cyclist in the area, these hills were a bugger to cycle up, and a quick thrill to ride down. Separating the Bournemouth plateau from St Catherine's Hill,  north of Christchurch,  is a wide valley joining Ringwood in the North with the south coast at Bournemouth Bay, close to Hengistbury Head.  The River Avon wandered through this wide valley, and in the 1960s the powers-that-be decided to build a dual carriageway along it, linking Bournemouth to Ringwood.  The whole route was farmland,  and when the machines started to strip the soil to lay the footings...

 "My" Dorset Barrow was on Candord Heath, close to Poole. It was on the edge of a gravel cliff that extends from Wimborne, along the south coast to St Catherines Hill, north of Christchurch. When I, and the diggers I was working with, were excavating the barrow, I camped in my tent alongside it to make sure that the boys that hollered in the valley below during the day, did'nt trample my beatifully cut section across the barrow during the moonlit nights. Aa I think I may have said, the barrow was a round mound right at the edge of a low cliff edge. At a distance from the mound was a gravel bank around it, and beyond that a ditch with a sharply cut base, "v" shaped. The mound was made up of cut turves from the surrounding area that may have been stacked against a post that slotted into a post hole that was found at the centre of the barrow. There was enough carbon in the posthole to date the barrow to 1000BC. Someone had spent a long time in prehistory sitting on...

 I first went digging in 1964. My first "proper" excavation was in 1968 when I assisted in the excavation of a mesloithic site on Hengistbury Head in Dorset. I was a "Digger" from 1973 to 1984, and a miseryguts from 1985 to 2007 when I worked on pipeline excavations for 2 years. I directed the excavation of a Dorset Barrow in 1975, in which I completely removed it from the face of the planet, and found not a bone, nor a pot, nor a sherd, nor anything that might represent the idea that the barrow was a funerary monument, as i was lead to believe. I don't think I ever recovered from that, and I have questioned every archaeological theory ever since. I came to Orkney first in 1980, and having all my living relatives here in Orkney, I moved to Orkney in 2019. Here, I started researching Neolithic Britain, and Orkney. Not satisfied with the idea that people had boats in Neolithic Britain that could cross the English Channel, I researched everything that I could to pr...

  More from "Report on the Excavations at Skara Brae. The Excavations in 1927", BY J. Wilson Paterson. "A description and list of the finds from the excavation is given below. Here it will be convenient to give some account of the disposition of objects on the floor of Hut 7 since no such observations have previously been published. In this way some idea may be formed of conditions of life in the hut at the moment of its final abandonment. As already stated, the floor-level was covered over with a dark coloured slime, through which projected, beside the slabs of the fixtures ("pens" and the hearth), a number of broken beam-slabs in complete disorder, and therefore not in siiu. It was, in general, under the levelof these that finds were made. I believe them to have fallen from above. In their fall they would have smashed slate paving-slabs had such been present. Broken pieces of thin slates were, in fact, found all about the floor mixed up with the slime and ref...

Vere Gordon Childe   The most famous monument on Orkney is Skara Brae, dubbed the “Neolithic Village” and excavated by, among others, the equally famous V. Gordon Childe. His excavation was undertaken between 1927 and 1930. He wasn’t the first to excavate the site, but he did become the most famous and influential archaeologist to be linked to Orkney at the time, and the account of his work gives an interesting impression of the decline of the settlement. Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957), was born in North Sydney, Australia, the son of London-born parents Rev. Stephen Henry Childe, and his second wife Harriet Eliza, née Gordon. He was to become an archaeologist and political theorist. Known as Gordon, he was educated at Sydney Church of England Grammar School, and the University of Sydney. He graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in 1914 with first-class honours in Latin, Greek and philosophy. He then won a scholarship to Oxford, in Great Britain, where he studied classical archaeology ...