Skara Brae, A Neolithic Village?

 

Skara Brae

A Neolithic Village? 

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.

 Skara Brae

Skara Brae is here described by the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historic Monuments Scotland

“The west coast of Orkney is mostly very rugged, with high cliffs and pounding Atlantic waves prohibiting coastal settlement, and the only shelter to be found is in the three bays of Birsay, Marwick and Skaill. But the size and shape of these bays has been altered by erosion over the centuries, and the settlement of Skara Brae, when it was founded some 5000 years ago, was certainly not on the shore as it is now but set well back from the sea. Environmental evidence even suggests that a freshwater loch, like the Loch of Skaill behind Skaill House, may have separated the site from the sea and its immediate sandy shore. The name Skara Brae was originally coined to describe the huge sand-dune that covered the site until storm damage in 1850 revealed the presence of stone structures and midden deposits, and, although erosion has destroyed the northern margin of the settlement, it seems likely that the impression given by the visible surviving remains is essentially accurate: this was, architecturally and socially, a tightly knit housing complex for a small community of perhaps fifty people.

Radiocarbon dating suggests that Skara Brae was inhabited for around 600 years, during which time there was rebuilding and modification of the houses and interconnecting passages, and inevitably most of the structures visible today represent the final layout of the village.

Its focus consists of six square or rectangular houses linked by narrow irregular passages, very much an inward-looking complex, with a single isolated building of somewhat different design on the west side of the village.

The evidence of burnt stones and chips of chert found in this building (no. 8) suggests that it was not an ordinary house but a workshop, probably where chert tools were manufactured (chert was used as a substitute for flint, which in Orkney occurs only as relatively small nodules washed up on the shore).

The main group of domestic houses has two remarkable characteristics: embedded in midden, it is virtually subterranean, and the internal design of its housing units has a standard uniformity. Both aspects were deliberate and, assuming that there was no prehistoric equivalent of a modern building contractor at work here, they must indicate a very strong sense of corporate identity amongst the families of this community.

Each house consists of a single room with thick drystone walls surviving in some places as high as 3m. There is a marked contrast between the cramped conditions of the passageways and the equally low and narrow doorways and the spacious and comfortable house-interiors, again a contrast that must have been deliberate and which mirrors the design of contemporary tombs with their low tunnel-like passages and soaring chambers.

It is as if the ideology of their builders demanded that getting there should be humiliatingly difficult but living there, whether in life or death, should be glorious. Small cells were built into the walls, mostly for storage but some furnished with drains as lavatories. A large square earth with stone kerbs occupies the centre of each house, and the use of stone slabs to build furniture has left us with an unusually precise picture of how the rest of the room was arranged (best seen in nos 1 and 7).

Slab built beds flanked either side of the hearth, and a stone dresser was built against the wall opposite the door. Wall cupboards and stone boxes sunk into the floor provide extra storage space. To these bare essentials the visitor’s eye should add heather and furs to the beds, skin canopies spanning the bed-posts, decorative pottery jars to the dresser, flame to the hearth, dried meats and fish hanging from the rafters...

Traces of earlier houses suggest a greater variety of plan and perhaps less sophisticated interior design: no. 9 is the most complete, and it has a central hearth and bed-alcoves built into the thickness of the walls.

Without demolishing the later houses, it is impossible to reconstruct the appearance of the original village, but the basic economy and material culture of the community seems to have changed little over the centuries, suggesting that the overall form of the settlement probably also remained the same.” (RCAHMS)

Structure 7 (above) is the most complete building found at Skara Brae. It’s condition is preserved, and it is barred from public access. A copy has been reconstructed for the benefit of the visiting public, as part of the site entrance and museum. All the other main structures were discovered in the Late 19th century, but this one was found by V. Gordon Childe’s team in 1927-30.

The following is Paterson's account of Childe’s excavation. In many places the record says much more about the author than it does about his subject, and for that reason it’s fascinating.

"Provisional Report on the Excavations at Skara Brae, and on finds from the 1927 and 1928 Campaigns by Professor V. Gordon Childe and J. Wilson Paterson, (The Excavation in 1927, by J. Wilson Paterson.)"

“Exploring in pure sand...... the top of a firm wall came to light 2 ‘feet 6 inches below the turf. It was then followed round counter-clockwise until the whole superficial area of the chamber had been determined. Except for the gap over the door the wall was practically continuous all round and remarkably firm. No trace of midden was encountered during this operation, nor indeed at any point within 3 feet of the wall top. The whole chamber was filled with drift sand, with which were mixed a certain number of stones of various sizes, some reminiscent of the slabs used for roofing passages. At a depth of about one and a half feet from the brink of the wall a veritable layer of large stones lying in utter chaos came to light. These stones were of the same general shape and size as those used in the construction of the chamber walls, and had no doubt slipped in from the higher courses thereof. Still, despite their quantity, the stones discovered could hardly have sufficed to complete the roof as a beehive vault, the chamber having a diameter at the top of the extant walls of just under 14 feet.

Skara Brae, plan

At the same level a number of curious “ pigeon holes” formed in the walls by the omission of a header stone, principally at the corners, came to light. Upright slabs also came into sight which proved to belong to temporary structures built on the sand while the chamber was silting up. Both above and below the layer of stones stray red-deer antlers had turned up, and below the stones layers of ashes mingled with limpet shells and the bones and antlers of deer were encountered at various levels. In the same strata hammer-stones sometimes turned up, but no significant artefacts beyond a broken bone awl and a fragmentary stone mortar that might conceivably have been left on ledges of the wall while the chamber was still regularly inhabited and have fallen thence. However, at a depth of 2 feet 6 inches from the wall rim a sort of stone box standing on loose sand had been built against the rear wall. An analogous but far less well-defined structure was brought to light in the north-east corner. In both cases the materials used were thin stone slabs, and the manner of building is reminiscent of that used for the fixtures in the intact chambers. There were thus clear remains of temporary occupations after the original doorway had been silted up with sand. The lowest of such traces of reoccupation came at a depth of 5 feet 5 inches, and was represented by a thin layer of ashes, including a few limpet shells and burnt bones. But a few inches higher up, at a depth of 5 feet, proof of a more serious occupation was afforded by a rectangular hearth framed by curbstone slabs and floored with a slate slab, precisely as in the case of the central hearth in each chamber. Red-deer antlers were found immediately under the slabs of this hearth, which stood on loose sand.

Houses 6 and 7, plan

These layers of ashes and shells, red-deer antlers, and structures resting on loose sand prove clearly enough that man periodically visited the chamber, it would seem, in order to cook and eat venison while the chamber was actually filling up with drifted sand. From the style of their constructions and the two artefacts mentioned it would seem probable, and in the case of the stone-hearth builders certain, that the visiting roisterers belonged to the same tribe as the hut-builders. Very likely indeed they were residents in some of the later huts. They cannot have reached the chamber through the proper door, which was already blocked up far too deeply. Perhaps they gained access to the chamber through the breach above the lintel, which may have been made for that purpose. A fairly high date for these visits is implied in the abundance of red-deer (the antlers, all unworked, exceed 25 in Number), that can hardly have been imported from Caithness in these numbers and must have died out in the island soon after 1000 A.D., if not before.

House 7, section

Already, before the stone hearth 5 feet down had been reached, fast stones belonging to the original fixtures of the chamber had begun to project through the sand, and thereafter these rapidly multiplied. At the same time the sand became ever damper. When eventually we reached the floor layers we were working in a slimy mass having very much the consistency of a blanc mange. It consisted of saturated sand merging into the red clay of the floor, and containing, in suspension, broken bones, lost artefacts, and all sorts of refuse. In this glutinous mass a multitude of large stones, mostly broken, were lying about in disorder, forming unstable and slippery islands on which one was glad to stand as refuges from the surrounding morass. Under these circumstances stratigraphical methods had inevitably to be abandoned, and it is seldom possible to state whether a given object was recovered in the floor itself or in the slime lying upon it. In view, however, of the comparative thinness of the deposit in question, seldom more than a couple of inches deep and of the internal consistency of the finds, this defect does not seriously affect our conclusions.

The floor proper consisted of a reddish clay 5 to 8 inches thick and apparently almost water-tight. In its superficial levels (to a depth of 2 inches) implements as well as animals’ bones were embedded, but though finely comminuted particles of bone and ashes were found throughout its extent, the lower layers where they were intact were quite sterile in respect of artefacts. Below this thick clay layer, that I regard as artificial, came a deposit of sand, from 8 to 10 inches deep and quite clean. This rested directly on the virgin soil — blue clay passing over almost at once into shale. The hearth enclosure was filled entirely with red clay mingled with cinders to a depth of over 1 foot. Below this came the virgin soil without any sandy layer intervening.

The hearth had apparently been originally a pit dug in the sand and surrounded by the usual stone curbing. From these soundings it may be inferred that the walls of the chamber are founded upon the rock.

In any case, there is no trace of a prior occupation of the hut site, nor is there any stratified accumulation upon the present floor. Though the occupants of the chamber tolerated an incredible amount of filth on its floor, they did not allow this to accumulate into a substantial deposit. This squeamishness is doubtless responsible for the existence of the midden.

Chamber 7 is a very typical example of a Skara hut. Since these have been so admirably described by Petrie it is unnecessary here to go into details. The chamber might be described as a flattened circle or as a rounded square—the sides, that is to say, are straight lines, but the corners are rounded. The breadth of the chamber on the floor-level is just 17 feet, its depth a little less. The walls are built of dry masonry, using the flattened shale fragments that can be found in abundance on the beach. The masonry is far from primitive. Its authors understood the principle of breaking band, and sometimes even resorted to the stretcher-header method. As might be expected in a structure that was at least partially subterranean, no exact orientation is discernible; none the less the corners approximate to the points of the compass. Naturally, too, there are no windows, at least in the 9 feet of wall available for study. On the other hand, as in other chambers at Skara, there are various niches or ambries in the walls.........

In point of fact we simply do not know how the chambers were roofed over. The walls of No. 7, as of other chambers, converge considerably, each course, especially in the corners, projecting slightly beyond the one below it; but on the straight side .the overhang at a height of 9 feet is less than 1 foot. Mr Houston has worked out a hypothetical completion of the roof on the beehive principle. This gives a vault 13 feet 6 inches to 14 feet high at the apex.

Chamber 7 is (approached) by a narrow passage 3 feet 6 inches long and 4 feet high, paved with slate slabs and entered at its outer end by a very narrow doorway. The jambs are scarcely 3 feet apart, and the threshold is formed by a narrow slab set on edge. The passage within is faced on either side with two large but thin slate slabs in which holes for a bar have been cut immediately behind the jambs. On the north-east there is an aperture in the thickness of the wall to give play to this bar, that must have been used for blocking the door-just as in the brochs.

Round the chamber walls are arranged various fixtures of stone slabs, most of which have counterparts in the other chambers. (these are described here)

All the foregoing features can be more or less accurately paralleled in other chambers and were accordingly already familiar. We must now mention two details which are so far unique, and which yet must rank among the original fittings of the hut. 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. Though the earth round the head was looser and drier than the clay of the floor the corpse firmly proved to be embedded in a glutinous mass of clay and limpet shells mixed with a few burnt animal bones. In this same mass were found one Skaill flake and a chip of translucent flint devoid of secondary working. There is no reason to suppose that these had filtered in through the crack in the cover-stone, so that they, together with the limpet shells and animal bones, must rank as funerary gifts. In view of the cramped space for working and the bad light the exact position of the skeleton is not as clear as could be wished. It could, indeed, never be viewed, but had to be traced by touch. As the ribs and vertebrae were little harder than the tenacious matrix in which they were embedded their exact disposition is questionable. However, it is certain that the legs were doubled up and that the whole body lay in the contracted posture, probably on its right side, facing outwards.

But after skeleton 1 had been extracted, the pelvis and long bones of a second came into view. It was then resolved to suspend operations till the wall had been supported with shores and then to remove the cap-stone. When this was done, it appeared that a gap 30 inches wide had been left in the foundations of the chamber wall. This gap was spanned by a cross-beam like a lintel, under which the cap-stone passed.

(The cist in which the skeletons were found is described)

Skeleton 2 lay in the contracted position on the left side with the legs drawn up nearly to the chin. The left arm was extended beneath the body and legs, while the right was bent at the elbow to an angle of 45 degrees, so that the hand was in front of the face. The skull lay far in under the chamber wall, reposing on a stone pillow and crushed in by another stone that came from some undeterminable point above.

Mixed up with the bones of this skeleton too were many limpet shells, forming an integral part of the mass previously mentioned.

The position of the two skeletons and the grave that contained them make it certain that their interment was anterior to the building of the present chamber wall. The tomb formed an integral part of the hut as it stood before its desertion. It might have been argued that the tomb, like the short-cist interment with a cinerary urn under the wall of an alleged cashel in Arran (Book of Arran, p. 205), had no immediate connection with the hut builders; they might have discovered and respected a much older interment. The fortunate discovery of the Skaill flake is, however, fatal to such an explanation. Beyond all possibility of reasonable doubt the tomb was built and the bodies deposited in it by the same people who built the village of Skara Brae. It is surely not far-fetched to regard the individuals thus buried with a minimum of funerary gifts under the walls of such a luxurious and elaborate chamber as victims of a foundation sacrifice. The belief that the immolation of human victims was necessary to give stability to house walls is so widespread among primitive peoples to-day and is so well attested both archeologically and textually in oriental antiquity (see Article “Foundation” in Basting’s Encyclopaedia) that its existence in early Scotland need give no cause for surprise.

In both the front corners of enclosure Z stood, on the slate floor, large cooking-pots containing a mess of animal bones—doubtless a prehistoric stew. Next to the more southerly pot stood a large basin of cretaceous bone, and immediately behind it a stone mortar. In the corner, against the wall, stood a small cup made out of the vertebra of a whale. In Y there was little but bones, a huge quartzite pebble, and a decorated pot that fell to pieces when touched.

On the opposite side a small cup made from the rear vertebra of a whale stood in the corner E. In the north-east end of pen D the skull of a short-horned bull was lying on a slate slab. Just outside the southern slab of this pen and right against the wall in corner F stood a fine little stone mortar, and close by remains of a pot. In front, but still close to D, lay together two bone picks and a scapula that had been used as a shovel. Several tusk pendants lay embedded in the floor in the same corner.

Cell K sheltered a large pot, as usual incapable of preservation. Behind it, against the wall, we found a small cache of beads and pendants.

At the south side of the hearth had stood a very large pot with a decorated rim. Unfortunately this had been smashed by the fall of I, and the rim part, in particular, had been reduced to pulp.

The foregoing relics may be regarded as having been found in the positions which they had normally occupied when the hut was inhabited.

A different explanation is needed for the beads found in the doorway and in (the entrance) passage. A great number of beads and pendants were collected just inside the threshold and in the passage immediately beyond it. The largest pieces lay just on the inner side of the sill, which it will he remembered is set on edge and projects above the level of the passage floor. This collocation of the jewels suggests that they had fallen from a necklace which had broken during its owner’s hurried exit from, the chamber. The majority of the dropped trinkets lay just in the place where, owing to the extreme narrowness of the door, such a catastrophe was most liable to happen. However, another extensive group of beads was found under a slate slab in the passage C, about 4 feet from the doorway. Whether this lot, which included several fine pendants, should be assigned to the same necklace is doubtful.

The position of the remaining relics could not be regarded as significant. Often they must have been awaiting us in the places where the hut’s inhabitants had originally lost them in the filth of the floor.

While the essential homogeneity of the industrial remains, and especially of the pottery from the Skara village, demonstrated the cultural, and hence also (if the unit be large enough) chronological, unity of the site, conspicuous architectural discrepancies prove that this unity embraces a multitude of structural phases. It is not yet the time, nor am I the person, to undertake a detailed examination of these peculiarities. But certain general points may here be laid down for the guidance of future excavations.

We have as one fixed point passage A and the chambers opening on to it, Nos. 1-5. These were presumably inhabited as late as any structures hitherto discovered. The last phase of their occupation, illustrated in the finds made in them and in the upper 18 inches of midden, may be termed the A phase. Before the close of this occupation passage B had fallen into disuse, its entrance having been used as a dump for limpet shells. On- the evidence at our disposal it seems likely that Hut 7 was abandoned by this date, which we may regard as the end of phase B. In Hut 7, therefore, we. Might assign the reoccupations only to phase A. Its regular occupation will fall into Phase B. But in passage C we have traces of a still older system that had become obsolete while Hut 7 was still inhabited. This system is denoted for us by the still unexplored depths of the area termed “Chamber 6.” When this earlier system was in use there was a doorway opposite the entry to Hut 7 opening on to passage C. This doorway may well have given access to the old chamber, whose existence has to be inferred from the fragments of curved and converging wall found South of door L.”

Under a heading of: The Relics, Childe describes the finds that he came across in his excavation. After describing bone implements, of which he found, borers, pins and needles, spatulas, picks and shovels, he describes the stone implements.

“By far the commonest stone tool is an oval knife. One face is naturally smoothed, being the outer surface of a water-rolled stone, while the other is rough. Petrie explained the manufacture of this tool in 1867, and I have verified his account. Such a knife can, in fact, easily be made by dashing a rounded piece of local shaley stone from the beach sharply on the ground, when it breaks along the bedding-plane, yielding a flake of the required form. An immense number of knives of this kind were included in the midden, four or five lay on the floor of Hut 7, and one was found in the grave.

Scrapers might be made from similar beach-stones broken in half. One found had been formed by bisecting such a stone and then removing flakes all round the edge in the manner of a Mousterian disc. Both scraper and knife might easily be mistaken for natural products but for their context.

Carved Stone Balls.—Two balls of stone covered with protuberances (one perforated) are figured by Petrie. Two more were brought to light in 1928. One lay on the floor of Hut 7.

Besides the foregoing specialised types the site yielded many pounders, rubbing-stones, and pot-boilers that need no description. Querns, however, were conspicuously absent.

Flint, being quite rare locally, was at all times sparingly used in the Orkneys. Flakes are nevertheless comparatively common at Skara.

One small unworked flake was found in the grave under the wall of Hut 7. Of implements, by far the commonest type was a small thumbnail scraper. Seven of these were found on the floor of Hut 7, one in Passage C, and a third in the midden over passage LM. Others came to light after I left. The worked edge is generally very finely trimmed.

The Skara pottery is, in fact, the worst I have ever handled. It is so coarse and badly baked that for a time I mistook the first large lump of it I came across in the midden for a plaster hearth, such as are so often met in Danubian settlements. Skara pottery is so badly fired that when first uncovered in the midden it can be cut with a penknife. In the damper environment of a hut floor it is sometimes literally plastic.”

The pottery here, and at the current Ness of Brodgar excavation is of generally poor quality. It is probable that this is because wood that would fire clay at a higher temperature was in short supply. Any available alternative to timber is likely have produced less heat, and a considerably weaker pottery.

“On drying in the sun it soon becomes friable. No complete vessel could be rescued. The majority of the sherds come from the midden, and even there the rims have been so distorted by pressure that the original curvature can no longer be estimated.

The great majority of our fragments come from cooking-pots. In these the clay is of inferior quality and mixed with large lumps of grit. The firing is usually incomplete. In fact it looks as if only the outer skin has been really baked, the core remaining black and incoherent.

It was impossible to reconstruct the shape of any of these coarse vessels, but all had flat bottoms and the sides were probably almost straight. Besides this coarse, thick ware a few fragments of smaller vessel were discovered. These were a little finer in texture and a trifle better fired, but still very coarse, unpolished, and far from solid. The fragments seem to come from small round-bottomed bowls or dishes.

Pot Lids.—The pots were covered with discs of slate or shale carefully trimmed all round. One of our pots lay crushed beneath its lid, and such lids were very numerous both in the midden and in Hut 7—an additional indication that the midden areas include open-air cooking places and occupation levels.

The Skara villagers used cetaceous bone for vessels of a more sumptuous kind than rough cooking-pots. In Hut 7 we were fortunate enough to secure one complete bowl carved out of the vertebra of a large whale. As restored by Mr Edwards it constitutes the finest example of such a vessel in any Scottish collection. Its base is rounded.

On the affinities of the Skara culture we are to-day rather better informed. The style of building adopted is, in a general way, the same as that employed on the island from the beginning of the archaeological record in the chambered cairns of Unstan, etc. The huts are merely glorified versions of the structures whose ruins constitute the hut-circles of northern Scotland, and the roofed “ streets “ are the culminating form of the long, low, entrance passages already foreshadowed in the hut-circles. The pottery certainly comes of a stock native to North Britain.”

The “Report on Bones from Skara Brae by Professor T. H. BRYCB, M.D., F.S.A.Scot.”, is a humane telling of the lives of two elderly women who died and were buried, probably in the early period of settlement at the “village “.

“Two skeletons labelled F. I. and F. II. found in a cist at Skara Brae during the excavations of 1928 were sent to me for examination and report. The following is a brief provisional account of the remains.

Both individuals were women. The characters of the pelvic bones make this conclusion indubitable. Both women must have suffered during life from osteoarthritis, an affection which may have been induced by the cold and damp conditions under which they lived.

The typical lesions of the disease are seen in the joints of the limbs and in the vertebral column. The limb joints were more seriously implicated in skeleton F. II. than in F. 1. In both the knee-joints suffered most, and in F. II. these joints were profoundly affected.

The joint surfaces show the increase in the density of the bone and the eburnation which indicates that the cartilage had disappeared, while new bone has been laid down in considerable quantity round the margins of the articulations. The hip and elbow joints have largely escaped in both individuals. In the shoulder joints a distinct ring of new bones surrounds the articular surface, but this is not eburnated.

In both cases the vertebral column has been seriously implicated, and especially in the lumbar region. The bodies of the vertebrae are flattened and expanded, and their edges are produced, by formation of new bone, into lips overlapping the intervertebral discs. Technically this condition is known as spondylitis defornians.

Of the two women the one represented by F. II. was more robustly built and rather taller than her companion. She was, in life, about 5 feet 4f inches in stature, while the other, F. I., was an inch or more shorter and the bones were less stout.

The bones of the legs in both cases show the same features described in the Bennibister bones, which indicate that the dwellers in these low underground dwellings must have habitually adopted the squatting posture from early life. The changes in conformation of the bones are readily explicable on this hypothesis.

The skull of F. I. was recovered almost entire; that of F. II. was broken into many fragments, but it was found possible to reconstruct the brain case.

From the condition of the sutures and the edentulous state of the jaws it may be concluded that the individual F. I. had reached advanced life. The second person was not so old, but was well on in middle age.

Both skulls are moderately long and narrow, the cephalic index of F. I. being 75’8 and of F. II. 74’6.

The face of F. I. was destroyed beyond possibility of repair, but that of F. II. was entire. It is remarkably small and low, and the orbits are specially low and rectangular. The nose is small and the nasal bones project somewhat.

The brain case in both skulls has the same general form and proportions as that in the series of skulls from Rennibister described last year, but the face of F. I. is quite different, being markedly lower, while the orbits are distinctly smaller and of less height. F. I. differs from F. II. In having a narrower frontal width.

The characters distinctive of race are indeterminate. Beyond a rather projecting nose there are no features suggestive of the Nordic Type, nor, on the other hand, can it be said that the skulls belong to the other dolichocephalic type—the Mediterranean. They are specimens such as might be found among the skulls of a mixed race like the present-day inhabitants of the Orkney Islands and of Scotland generally.”