About



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 questioned every archaeological theory ever since.

I came to Orkney first in 1980, and moved here 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 or PentlandFirth, I researched everything that I could to prove that they did have boats., (yes, they had boats).

Then I set out to prove that they did not need boats. That there was land between Europe and England, and land between Scotland and Orkney.

That led me to uncover the extraordinary story of a small group of Neolithic people who became castaways on each of the British Isles.

Jeffery Nicholls 

South Ronaldsay 

Orkney 

The Orkney Riddle (index here) is a series of blogs promoting the notion that Neolithic people walked from Scotland to Orkney to build the Ring of Brodgar. 

Email jiffynorm@yahoo.co.uk 

#Orkney #archaeology #Neolithic #prehistory #British #SkaraBrae #NessofBrodgar #BIIS ##Britice-Chrono 








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