One of the curious things about archaeology is that, while it is relatively easy to see the fruits of our labours, it is much harder for people to watch us at work. Most people live within reach of a stone circle, castle, or other archaeological site. Getting to visit an excavation is another matter, especially in these days of commercial contracts. Hence the popularity when it first opened of the Jorvik DIG centre and of television programmes like Time Team.

Here in Orkney, visitors are spoilt for choice. The archaeological sites here are well-known and a popular draw for tourists. Should you be visiting this summer, you also have a choice of nine excavations to visit. All within an area of 990 km² (according to Google), and all visitor-friendly. Most have Open Days. Not only that – the work covers a range of periods from Neolithic, through Iron Age to Medieval. Truly something for everyone.

Of course, the big site, and one whose global reach draws in visitors from far afield, is Ness of Brodgar in Mainland Orkney. Only discovered in 2003, excavation of the monumental buildings, highly decorated pottery and other finds here is revealing a hitherto unimagined side to Neolithic Orkney. There are regular tours and Open Days as well as a daily blog. To the south, in South Ronaldsay, the excavation of the broch and associated structures at The Cairns has just ended.  Work this year focussed on the well at the heart of the broch where organic preservation revealed a complete wooden bowl as well as other rare Iron Age material. In Kirkwall, over the weekend of 29 – 30^th June, test pitting in the grounds of 54 Victoria Street, at the Blide Trust, allowed a group of community volunteers to try their hand at archaeology and uncover some of the Medieval and more recent history of the site.

In the island of Rousay, there have been two excavation projects. At Skaill farmstead a team from The University of the Highlands and Islands Archaeology Institute are investigating the nineteenth century and early history of the ruins that mark a once-thriving settlement. Their finds suggest that the site goes back at least to the Norse period. Further along the coast a team from the University of Bradford are excavating the multi-period site of Swandro before it drops into the sea. The buildings here date from the Neolithic, Iron Age, Pictish and Norse periods, and it is no easy task to untangle the complex history of the site, but sadly coastal erosion is an ever-present threat to much of the archaeology of the islands.

Over in the island of Sanday, archaeologists from the University of Central Lancashire have teamed up with The University of the Highlands and Islands Archaeology Institute to research three of the island sites, dating to the Neolithic and Bronze Age. The digs on the Early Neolithic houses at Cata Sand, the Burnt Mound at Loth Road, and the Neolithic Tomb at Tresness have each, in their own way, revealed surprises – that is what makes archaeology such fun! You can never predict the outcome. I’m not sure why the diversity and complexity of the remains of the past continue to amaze us, but they do.

Finally, in Westray, the furthest north of the sites, lies Links of Noltland where excavation on an extensive Neolithic settlement site has been ongoing, intermittently, since the late 1970s. I have a soft spot for this site, because, although it was visited by George Petrie in the nineteenth century, it had fallen out of sight and so I was lucky enough to be tasked by the National Museum of Scotland, to look for it not long after I graduated in 1977. It is a wonderful place to visit, an opportunity to get up close to well-preserved Skara Brae type houses as they emerge from the sands of the beach at Grobust.

This focus of practical investigation on Orkney is, it seems to me, remarkable, and it brings both advantages and disadvantages. Of course, the uncovering of the rich history of the islands is to be welcomed. And it is great to see research on lesser known periods such as Medieval Orkney and the nineteenth century. But, one has to ask whether it can, sometimes, shift attention away from equally deserving parts of Scotland. Even if we can be sure that other areas receive equal investigation, there is the possibility that the so-called ‘special’ archaeology of Orkney is merely an artefact of our own making. By concentrating our efforts in the north, have we created the impression that archaeology there is ‘better’ than that to be found elsewhere? In reality the lives of the people of the past in other parts of Scotland are no less well-preserved, less interesting, or less well-deserving. The so-called primacy of Orkney has long been debated, and provides the basis for a favourite essay or exam question to set one’s students.

Setting such introspection aside, I do love working as an archaeologist in Orkney. There are so many archaeologists here that you might think that we would all be jostling for work, but in reality, there is plenty to keep us busy, and weeks can pass without bumping onto one another. There is always room for more. When I lived in Edinburgh no one quite knew what I did for a living. Here, being an archaeologist is commonplace. Most people are well informed and interested – you see friends at lectures, and get into erudite conversations at the supermarket checkout.

It is the way it should be: archaeology is valued and respected, yet unexceptional. A familiar part of everyday life.

Many years ago (more than I care to remember) I used to meet with a group of archaeological colleagues for a relaxing drink on a Friday night in Edinburgh. Most of us were involved, at one time or another, in working on the Neolithic archaeology of Orkney. Even then Orkney was regarded as something special. Being archaeologists we rarely left our work totally behind but rather used the time to discuss some of the most pressing dilemmas in our archaeological interpretations. I remember animated debates as to the meaning of the two very different pottery styles to be found in Neolithic Orkney. Did they, as some people thought, overlap, or had one supplanted the other. Radiocarbon dating had not long been employed and it was still something of a blunt tool – in many ways it did not lend much to our discussion. Another favourite topic was the meaning of the different styles of tombs and houses to be found in Orkney. It all seemed very bipartite. Were we simply observing the transformations in society that lead to changes in material culture? But was it a simple linear, evolutionary change? Or were there more nefarious elements at play. In short, did the advent of new styles of tomb and house (and other material culture) mean the advent of new people with new ways, did it signal some sort of social unrest or change, or was it just a matter of time?

You will notice that the uncertainties of dating at the time were such that we were able to assume that everything had changed at much the same time.

Now, I read with interest a new paper, by Alex Bayliss and colleagues, recently published in Antiquity. Alex is one of the wizards of radiocarbon dating. Using a statistical technique, known as Bayesian analysis, she is able to produce much tighter estimates of age from calibrated radiocarbon dates in conjunction with existing understanding of the archaeological record. Together with her colleagues they have been looking at the dates available for the sites of Neolithic Orkney, and taking many new dates as well, in order to provide a detailed chronology for Neolithic Orkney and consider what it may mean.

It is an interesting, thought provoking paper that pulls together a huge amount of information. It has received much attention since it was published. There is a lot of useful information relating to issues like the length of use of specific sites, and the ways in which they may relate to one another. But I am left questioning some of their conclusions, and somehow I ended up feeling a little disappointed. One of the problems with publishing in Antiquity is that you have to keep your papers short, and, in this case, it meant that the evidence needed to back up their statements was often lacking.

There is useful information relating to the antiquity of timber houses in Orkney together with the stone buildings that became more common. There is information relating to the dating of different types of tomb, and to the pottery types. The general conclusion seems to be that some social differentiation and the concurrence of new ideas took place fairly early on in Neolithic Orkney (the overlapping of the different styles in tombs and pottery for example), but that around 2800 BC something happened that led to a geographical shift in settlements and the development of larger houses and more elaborate pottery. The authors note that events in the Neolithic heartland of Stenness-Brodgar were, however, very different.

One of my problems relates to this comparison of the sites in the Stenness-Brodgar area with those elsewhere in Orkney. Stenness-Brodgar is a very different place with a very different type of site. Ness of Brodgar is discussed as a ‘place of human dwelling’. Now there is not much yet published about Ness, but all the material that one can find leads one to believe that it is not a common or garden settlement. Surely, it is not, therefore, surprising to find that events there were different to those elsewhere. The authors are not, as I understand it, comparing like with like.

There is also a general assumption that the archaeology of Orkney is such that the known sites provide a representative sample of what went on in the past. I find this very doubtful. Not only does general research suggest that this is not so, the known sites represent only the places where we have looked for (or found), sites. But also, the very existence of sites like Ness of Brodgar, totally unknown until some ten years ago, tells us that we don’t know everything about Neolithic Orkney.

The authors conclude by suggesting that the variety of style and material culture in the earlier centuries of Neolithic Orkney may represent a competitive society in which communities sought to outdo each other in the monuments and houses that they built and the goods that they used. In this, the advent of elaborate flat-bottomed Grooved Ware pottery and different types of tomb might be seen as a way for one community to differentiate itself from others. Continual elaboration of house form and material culture is used to back this up and the paper talks of political tension and social concerns. Finally, the arrival of the Orkney vole is brought into play as a proxy for the introduction of new ideas and possibly even people directly from Europe in the later fourth millennium cal BC.

As I say it is an interesting paper. But I am left wondering whether, in nearly 40 years, we have really advanced at all in our archaeological deliberations. The arguments of the paper sound so much like those I used to hear in the pub. The dates are more tightly constrained, we have more sites, more variation in our sites, and, perhaps, more sophistication in our ideas. But I don’t really feel that I have learnt anything new. The dates presented confirm the old conundrums, they don’t explain them. For that we are left with unsupported speculation, just as we always have been. As you know, I don’t believe in an ‘archaeological truth’, and I guess we all love speculation, but we need to be careful not to suggest that it is founded in scientific fact.

Recently, a team of specialists drawn from the Universities of Leicester and Southampton announced the find of a new structure within the south circle at Avebury. It is an exciting find that reminds us that these ancient and well-loved places still preserve their secrets. I found it particularly interesting because of the way in which the new formation, said to be composed of megaliths that were removed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, comprises a square that is set within the heart of the surviving stone circle.

The team are, apparently, surprised to find a square megalithic setting, I can’t comment on that as my knowledge of megaliths around the UK is not, sadly, comprehensive, though I would point them to a paper published by Tim Darvill in the spring of 2016 which celebrates just this design at Stonehenge. I would also suggest that, were they to look north, they might find that the use of a square design, and indeed the overall design of a rectangle set within a circle is far from unusual. In fact, in Orkney, monuments comprising a square setting within a circle were all the rage among the special places of the late Neolithic. Perhaps the best known is Structure Eight at Barnhouse, where one is able to enter the reconstruction and experience for oneself how this type of architecture may have functioned. Another, well known example, is Structure Ten at Ness of Brodgar, only partly excavated but of similar design – contrast the angularity of the interior with the rounded nature of the exterior.

This internal angularity with external rounding is also seen in the house structure at Skara Brae, perhaps it is just how one did things in the Neolithic? But there is another site that suggests it may have a deeper meaning. Maeshowe is known for the circular platform on which it sits – yet the tomb interior is beautifully angular. Curiously, several archaeologists have suggested that there may have been a free standing rectangular stone setting on the platform at Maeshowe prior to the building of the tomb. And, of course, many of the stone-built chambered tombs of the north comprise rectangular chambers set within a rounded mound.

My guess is that were we to have a similarly detailed record of late Neolithic architecture right across the UK, we would find other uses of the square within the circle. Hopefully, the application of refined geophysics to sites away from the research heartlands of Wiltshire and Orkney will start to find them. What it actually meant is anyone’s guess, though I have noted before that it is still a powerful symbol (with many meanings) today. The new find at Avebury is indeed significant, but I’d caution against celebrating it as unique – to my mind it is more interesting if it starts to flesh out the nascent patterning of monumental settings that we are beginning to recognise across Neolithic Britain.

New Paper out on the development of the landscape around Ness of Brodgar.

Wickham-Jones, C.R., Bates, M., Bates, R., Dawson, S. and Kavanagh, E. 2016 People and Landscape at the Heart of Neolithic Orkney. Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 31 (2), 26-47.

Together with my colleagues, I’ve been working on a paper to discuss the results of our work on landscape change around the Ness of Brodgar, particularly relating to the Loch of Stenness. We published the tekky detail this time last year, and we were keen to explore what it might mean with relation to the Neolithic communities of the area and the siting of the monuments that make up the Heart of Neolithic Orkney. You really have to read the paper to get the full detail, but in essence our landscape reconstructions document the penetration of marine conditions into the dry land world of the Neolithic farmers at the heart of the islands. Given the emerging evidence for the ‘slighting of the sea’ in the Early Neolithic, it is fascinating that this fragile spot became so important to the island community.

It is possible to order a copy of the Landscape issue of Archaeological Review from Cambridge here. But I can let people have a pdf of our paper for individual research interests – just email me (my email address is on the home page).

I’m often asked about the site at Ness of Brodgar. It is an amazing place, and a fascinating excavation to visit. But I have to say that I am quite glad not to be a part of the project team. Ness is clearly very, very complex and exploring the history of a site like that is not an easy task. I can remember visiting Lionel Masters when he was excavating the long cairn at Grey Cairns of Camster in Caithness and feeling quite overwhelmed by all the stone work there. I have the same feeling at Ness of Brodgar. I don’t envy Nick Card and his colleagues the work that lies ahead as they follow and unravel the threads of human activity that have gone to make up the site.

It is a rare and exciting opportunity, however, to see a side of Neolithic life that we have only just begun to explore in Scotland: we have some detail of the houses and communities in which people lived; we have information on the great chambered tombs they built to house at least some of their dead and where we think people may have gathered as part of the cementing of local identities; we even have the great stone circles and henge sites where a wider expression of society is likely to have taken place. Ness shows us that there was more to life than that. Whatever it was, and we have yet to see the interpretations founded on painstaking analysis that will no doubt arise in years to come, it was clearly an important part of life in Neolithic Orkney.

One thing that fascinates me is the way in which (at a superficial level) Ness takes everything we know about Neolithic Scotland and magnifies it. It is deeply rooted in Neolithic building traditions across Scotland. Structure One, the earliest to be recorded, is similar to house two at nearby Barnhouse village. Both incorporate structural features seen in the houses at Skara Brae and, curiously, research suggests that ‘Skara Brae’ type structures may have been a common form of Neolithic house, built in timber elsewhere in Britain (at Durrington Walls for example).  Structure Ten, the great ‘temple’ building, has some resemblance to structure eight at Barnhouse, but is a much more complex building and incorporates an angularity in its outer wall that sets it aside from this. I’ve written earlier about the way in which movement inside these structures is mimicked in the arrangements elsewhere, at sites like Stonehenge.

Structure Ten aside, perhaps the most notable buildings at Ness of Brodgar are Structures Eight and Twelve, both beautifully built, both divided internally by stone piers which separate the space into bays, and both with curious ‘porches’ at one end. The obvious parallel to draw here would be to the Stalled Cairns, built in Early Neolithic Orkney to house the dead and provide a focal centre for individual communities. There is also a parallel to the Early Neolithic houses in Orkney, perhaps evidenced best at recently excavated sites like Braes of Ha’Breck on Wyre. But there is another striking parallel and that lies in the great timber halls of Early Neolithic Scotland, examples of which have recently been excavated from Aberdeenshire (eg at Crathes and Balbridie), to the southwest (eg Lockerbie).  Indeed, many of them are almost the same size as the structures at Ness, though the dates suggest that they may have been built as early as 3800 BC.

Perhaps there is actually more unity to the range of Neolithic buildings across the UK than we realise. I wonder whether the durability of the stone building materials used in Orkney have resulted in us ascribing more sophistication to them in relation to buildings elsewhere than we perhaps should. The function of the timber halls is, after all, hotly debated: were they straightforward houses? Or something more complex? Kirsty Millican has provided an interesting discussion of the available evidence in a new publication on Neolithic Scotland edited by Kenny Brophy, Gavin MacGregor and Ian Ralston. And it must be the case, surely, that other sites like Ness of Brodgar await discovery? Ness, itself, took over 150 years to be revealed amongst the well-known Orcadian monuments; other sites, made of timber would be far harder to expose.

Of course, Ness, as we know it so far, is merely the most recent manifestation of the buildings on site. You will know, if you have visited, that the excavation today sits atop a substantial mound of anthropogenic material that has built-up; excavation this year uncovered stonework well down in the stratigraphy, and every year it seems that there are new dates from lower samples that push activity on site back and back.  It does make one wonder what glories have yet to be discovered. If this was the finale – what can the origins have been like?

Ness of Brodgar is a remarkable site, but it is important not to lose sight of the fact that it was rooted within the community of Neolithic Orkney, and perhaps further afield across the UK. It no doubt played a pivotal role for the early farmers of Orkney, but when they built here they were clearly drawing on their expertise and experience. The architects took the familiar and created something unfamiliar – that was their skill and out of that they were able to create an exceptional place. Now it is our turn (or rather the turn of Nick and his team), to work backwards and re-create the stories of life there and the way in which it came into being.

If you are interested in finding out more about the Ness of Brodgar and its role in the world of Neolithic Britain it would be worth setting your television to record the new series on BBC Two starting next Monday at 9pm. It gives you a fabulous overview of Neolithic Orkney and current theories regarding its place in the world.