Animal bone deposits and ritual activity?
The archaeology keeps on coming at The Cairns broch today as the team continued to unearth more and more of this fascinating Iron Age structure.
As an archaeology student, this week has been a very steep learning curve for me – putting into practice the theory I’ve learned in lectures. The highlight for me was finding the whale rib in the broch yesterday.
Fortunately, we were able to recover it safely in one piece, in what was a very delicate and nerve-racking exercise. The bone will be examined by a zooarchaeologist, and perhaps its DNA analysed, to try to see if it belongs to the same animal, whose remains have been found elsewhere on site.
The whalebone discovery was amazing, but I am also very curious about its location in the broch and the special way in which it was deposited – aligned perfectly on top of the face of a long piece of stone. You cannot help but think this was a act performed in accordance with some long-forgotten Iron Age religion.
This notion of ritual activity appears time and again in the broch, and its surrounding structures, as if such actions were interwoven into the daily lives of the broch’s inhabitants.
Alannah and Tom found more evidence of this today. In the deep clay core of the broch, and under an orthostat, they found a complete red deer antler, shells, pottery and stone tools – all carefully deposited in very specific ways.
Elsewhere, more progress was made on the excavation of Structure O, where Lucijo excavated the remains of a neonate lamb, which was adjacent to a previously discovered cattle spine.
Outside the broch entrance, Francesca, Chloe and Holly worked around a shellfish midden revealing that Iron Age people really did like eating a lot of periwinkles!
Overall, our work on the broch this week will help advance our understanding of the lives of the inhabitants. We have found clear archaeological evidence that their lives were intertwined with ritual activity, presumably to bring good fortune, health and happiness.
Next week we will continue our quest to discover, and understand, this fascinating and marvellous structure and really get to grips with what was happening at the centre of the broch.
Dom Farrugia
Second Year BA (Hons) Archaeology
