Orkney Riddler

The Vole at Skara Brae   There follows edited extracts from a research document about the bones of rodents that were found at Skara Brae.  It details the volumes of vole and mice bones found in midden materials,  both inside and outside the monument, drawing conclusions about the possible utilisation of the vole as a food item. The report is :- Rodents: food or pests in Neolithic Orkney, by  Andrzej A. Romaniuk, Alexandra N. Shepherd, David V. Clarke,  Alison J. Sheridan,  Sheena Fraser, László Bartosiewicz, and Jeremy S. Herman. The Orkney archipelago, situated to the north of the British mainland, is renowned for its outstanding collection of Neolithic sites, a core group of which have been recognized with World Heritage status. Among the wealth of material recovered from the Orcadian Neolithic sites are copious rodent remains from two settlements, one the celebrated site of Skara Brae, and the other Links of Noltland, Westray.  These remains are fro...

  Orkney Riddle  Relative Sea Level Relative sea-level describes the change in sea level relative to the shorelines of the world's continents. Many countries with a shoreline have undertaken offshore surveys to establish a graph that relates present sealevel to those at prehistoric dates in the last 10,000 to 20,000 years. For Britain this work was carried out by a team headed by Ian Shennan. The results for their work are published as:- Relative sea-level changes and crustal movements in Britain and Ireland since the Last Glacial Maximum by Ian Shennan, Sarah L. Bradley, and Robin Edwards They introduce their results as follows:- The new sea-level database for Britain and Ireland contains >2100 data points from 86 regions and records relative sea-level (RSL) changes over the last 20 ka and across elevations ranging from ~þ40 to -55 m. It reveals radically different patterns of RSL as we move from regions near the centre of the Celtic ice sheet at the last glacial maximum t...

Orkney Riddle  Ice Age Story This is a story of Britain, and north-west Europe, as it passed through several periods of extreme cold, Ice Ages, the formative events that created the landscape we live with. It is not authoritative, and may be taken with a pinch of salt, but I hope that those who have learned, as I have, the geological history of Britain, will withhold any kneejerk response that may lurk unbidden in their bosoms. The general territory that the story covers is very roughly the Atlantic coast of Europe, but includes the Alpine mountains of southern France, and the northern mass of Scandinavia.  Specific areas that are covered are Britain, Norway, and the North Sea. These constitute an area that academia deems to have been covered by thick ice sheets, the British and Irish Ice-Sheet and the Scandinavian Ice-Sheet. These ice sheets are thought by some to have been joined across the North Sea for part of the last ice age. The theory that is proposed, studied, taught ...

Orkney Riddle    Jeffery Nicholls   A Potted History   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 an engineer from 1985 to 2007 when I worked on pipeline excavations for 2 years. I worked two seasons with G de G Sieveking in 1973 and 1974 at Grimes Graves.  I worked for Peter White on Ancient monuments from 1977 to 1984. I worked one season at Wroxeter Roman City for Philip Barker, and two seasons putting in the drains for Wroxeter in 1976 and 1977 for Peter Brown and Peter White. I directed the excavation of a Dorset Barrow in 1975, in which I completely removed the monument 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 q...

The Orkney Riddle  Solving the Riddle  The Riddle of neolithic Orkney is that there are insufficient significant structures on Orkney to support the huge numbers of hands that would have been been required to build the Neolithic monuments there, 5000 years ago. The Orkney Riddle is a group of  blogs based on this theme. It is named for the strand of undersea shallow beach that leads off east, from the Pentland Skerries, above,  in the Pentland Firth which may be the last relic of land that once connected Orkney to Scotland. This undersea feature is called the Sandy Riddle.  I started to research the geology of Britain over the last 100,000 years about 4 years ago. I began because I could find no real world evidence that Neolithic people had boats capable of transporting them and their animals across the Pentland Firth to Orkney in numbers sufficient to build the structures in Orkney that they clearly did. In order to get to an evidence based theory of both the ...

 The Stones of Brodgar  When I went to the Ring of Brodgar today I took a photo of each stone from outside the ditch. I have a theory that the Stones of Brodgar were set in their places with a sloping edge facing in the same relative direction in rotation around the circle. They obviously don't all have an obvious slope on one side. Also at least one of the stones fell over in historic or prehistoric times, and may have been re-erected by Historic Scotland staff. Could they have put them up wrongly? I don't know if my theory works. What do you think? Jeffery Nicholls