Cairns and the people in them
Cairns and the people in them BACK to Neolithic Migrants to Orkney In “Beside the Ocean of Time: a chronology of Neolithic Burial Monuments and Houses in Orkney”, Seren Griffiths lists the carbon dates of human bones from 10 Orkney cairns. The cumulative data for these skeletal remains demonstrates that about 75% of the people lain in the cairns died roughly before 3000BC, the rest of them died later, mostly through the 3rd millennium BC. Similar findings are suggested by dating of skeletons in Scotland and England, and it is likely that the fall in numbers of bodies in cairns is, as much as anything, because after a couple of hundred years of existence the cairns were in poor condition, and often collapsing, making them sometimes risky places to enter. Audrey Henshall, in “Neolithic cairns of Orkney” finds that there are around 80 cairns in Orkney, of which half are stalled cairns, linear structures with an oblong space within a great mound. The name refers to upright stones tha...