The Cairns Day Six – 2018

Hi everyone, its Martin here and today was the start of Week 2 of the project, so I thought I’d give a little round up of things on site.

In the south extension of the trench the digging caries on apace led by Linda. The upper ditch fills here are coming into ever more crisp focus, and the animal bone in Don’s area just keeps getting more extensive in the area it covers as well as the number of very large bone fragments.

There are semi-articulated bone groups and enough elements from the same species and from the same region of the animal body to suggest we have large portions of carcass being introduced into these upper fills. This is, in some ways, to be expected in the ditch as several Iron Age period ditches that have been excavated on Northern Isles sites have been similarly rich, and seem to show that ditches were important places for meaningful deposition as well as simply the disposal of waste products.

Meanwhile, still within the south extension, but slightly to the north, the area snug against the broch outer wall is changing rapidly, as well as throwing up some interesting finds. Large voids are appearing in the soils here and seem to hold out the promise of rubble and stonework just a little further down. Indeed, hopefully soon we’ll be able to reveal the connectedness of several hitherto disparate pieces of walling and show them to be all part of an entire building that we think should be roughly contemporary with the broch, essentially one of the village buildings that we call Structure J. The finds form this building today included several fairly well-preserved iron objects and two bone pins.

Inside the broch itself, the little team of Rick, Therese, Gary, Kath and Ross have been steadily excavating the floor in the western and south-eastern zones of the building. Last Friday’s glass bead found close to the hearth was a highlight, but hopefully there will be many more interesting items from these floors before we finish this season. The floor deposits are being excavated on a sample grid that allows us to control exactly where everything came from within the broch and allows us to build up a picture of distribution patterns across the floor. Hopefully, this will give us very good information about the range and location of activities within the broch during the Iron Age.

In the meantime this afternoon we recorded the opening into the cell within the broch’s western area. The lintels immediately over the entrance to the chamber have been destabilised in antiquity and we need to remove these in order to work safely inside the broch in this area. One way of recording these is through photogrammetry, where we place little targets on the masonry in order to act as reference points, and then we can create a very accurate rectified image and drawing based on this. You can see a photo of the cell doorway, the crooked lintels that we need to remove, and the photogrammetry targets in this blog.

In Area Q, Bobby and his team have been doing sterling work revealing several walls. In fact, these, are becoming very extensive, and I am beginning to hope that we are finally seeing some major stretches of wall reflecting big village buildings around this north-eastern side of the broch. Time will tell, but in the meantime the team are enjoying a rich array of animal bone from this area, including lots of red deer antler.

For the rest of the week we will be exploring the ditch, the broch interior, and the village buildings of Area Q further, whilst recommencing some areas from previous seasons including the souterrain passage immediately outside the broch. We’ll keep you updated as to how we get on.