Orkney Riddler

Crossing from the Stones of Stenness to the Ring of Brodgar  I remember reading about Stenness Loch and how surveying the floor of the loch suggested that the area had been a mixed terrain, including marshy ground and possibly some neolithic features. The discussion followed with the observation that as sea levels rose the sea water from the North Sea flooded through the Bridge of Waithes. In this way there is a separation between the two lochs where the Harray Loch is fresh water, and the Stenness Loch is salty. As there is a gap, a passage of water,  separating the Brodgar peninsula from the stones of Stenness and Maeshowe location, is it possible that early in the Neolithic period people came to this place and built a dam to block rivers flowing between Harray and Stenness to make it easier to get to the peninsula from Barnhouse, incidentally creating the fresh water lake?

  More from "Report on the Excavations at Skara Brae. The Excavations in 1927", BY J. Wilson Paterson. Quoted from the report  "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 u...

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 ...

Extract from "Report on the Excavations at Skara Brae. The Excavations in 1927, by J. Wilson Paterson." "At the back of pen Y we had at once been struck by a large upright slab against the north-west wall which, on examination, proved to be firmly built in. On clearing out the floor of the pen it was seen that this slab rested on a horizontal slab that passed beneath it under the wall behind, but also projected forwards some 2 feet in the red clay of the floor and partially covered thereby. At the front edge of this slab was found another slab on edge, running almost parallel to the wall. The horizontal slab had been broken in antiquity, and the front fragment, less than one-fifth of the whole was at once raised. Its removal disclosed a skull and other human bones lying in loose earth. Fearing to undermine the chamber wall if we removed the rest of the cover-stone, we took out the slab on the edge that formed the front side of the tomb and extracted the skeleton sideways...

  West Kennet Long Barrow In medieval times, and earlier, there must have been little speculation about the purpose of barrows and burial monuments on the British landscape. They were subject of myths and fairy tales, the homes of hobgoblins, and places where lover’s trysts, and the illegal exchange of contraband goods might have might taken place. It may have been only in the 19th century that people began to explore them and develop explanations for their existence, as just one of an enormous variety of landscape features that some 5000 to 10,000 years of human occupation have left behind. The people who started to wrestle with this history, the first archaeological pioneers, were members of an educated elite, reasonably wealthy, well read, well travelled, and often well placed in society. They drew their inspiration for the findings of the archaeological work that they were undertaking from classical literature and from their knowledge of earlier civilisations elsewhere. Ma...

Doggerland   Looking for evidence in the southern North Sea that might suggest that habitable land once linked Norfolk to Holland?  Shallow seas in the southern North Sea,  Doggerland and between Norfolk,  Lincolnshire and Holland.  Summary:- Two research documents are re-framed here to provide a proof that a land corridor once joined Norfolk to Holland allowing the migration of woodlands, vegetation, insects, reptiles, mammals,  and people between Europe and Britain,  until the Neolithic period of human prehistory.  The analysis of deposits sampled in the "Europe's Lost Frontiers" project records two major erosional events.  The first of these occurs as sea levels rise to drown wetland peats at around 9000BP,  or later. Peats growing in the region were drowned as sea levels rose. Peats growing at higher levels were not found ,and are therefore likely to have been removed from these locations by a later erosional event.  The second ...