Looking ahead to the 2024 excavation
Hello everyone! A warm welcome back to our regular blog for The Cairns excavation project. It’s wonderful to be back and to share our findings from the Iron Age site with you!
Today was spent finishing the removal of all the protective covers and tyres and, by the end of the day, we accomplished a lot, thanks to our dedicated team of professionals, students, and volunteers.
The weather was a bit overcast, with just occasional rain showers, but that didn’t hold us back and we’re ready to commence proper excavation tomorrow.
Let’s catch up a little on the site and look ahead to what we’re going to focus on this year in the excavations. Here are our plans for this season:
A crucial stage in the broch
Inside the broch we’re going to concentrate our efforts on excavating floors and occupation deposits as before.
The broch interior has been very rich in past seasons with a well-preserved series of floors and deposits rich in animal bone, environmental material, and some remarkable finds. Beautiful glass beads and metal jewellery items are some of the more memorable artefacts to have come from the broch.
We also can’t forget that the astonishing wooden bowl – the “Cairns Cog” – came from the broch interior, waterlogged down in the “well”, where we have also found remarkable strands of preserved human hair!
Overall, our research is intended to produce one of the most complete excavations of the occupation of a broch ever undertaken. To that end, we excavate on a grid to keep spatial control over the findings and we recover 100 per cent of all the soft soil deposits in sample tubs, so these can be sieved for environmental information, micro-artefacts, and other content.
We’ve spent a lot of time excavating the broch occupation already and, in certain zones of the interior, we have recovered evidence of long periods of occupation and recurrent renewal. In the West, Central and Southeast Rooms, we’ve revealed three successive superimposed floors with slab surfaces and hearths.
In the West Room, each stage involved a stone floor was equipped with a large hearth and subsequently capped by a set of occupation deposits before the next solid floor renewal took place with a new slab floor and new hearth. These cycles of occupation seem to attest to the longevity and continuity of occupation in the broch.
In the last few years, we’ve reached what we think are the earliest (primary) surviving cycle of occupation in the several of the rooms of the broch interior but elsewhere, in other areas and rooms of the broch, we’ve a way to go before reaching similarly early moments.
In the Central Room last year, we reached an occupation-related deposit of red ashy clay (possibly an in-situ hearth) and around it many of the upright slabs forming the room seemed to be “bottoming-out”, we could see the packing stones emerging that had been used in their original construction to set them up. Is the ash the remains of an early central hearth dating to a time before the upright partitions and the current layout?
The big question is: is there another phase of broch occupation beneath this, one that predates the current rather unorthodox layout? Alternatively, was the observed layout the one with which the broch was equipped from the very outset? We’re clearly on the brink of reaching the base of the broch layout as we currently know and understand it. We’ve reached an absolutely crucial stage of the work in the broch!
The Southeast Room of the broch is another substantial area of the broch that we’ll spend considerable time in this season. Over the years, it has produced floor layer after floor layer that we have excavated.
We’re currently poised on a beautiful multi-coloured clay floor deposit with a substantial hearth in its midst. We will excavate this clay floor on our usual sample grid for the sake of spatial control over what artefacts and environmental remains come out of it. Again, we’re excited to see what materials are within this floor and, indeed, if there is yet another floor beneath it, or whether something else lies underneath.
We have observed groups of cobble stone tools and rubble-like stones sticking up from an eroded part of the clay floor in one small patch so there exists the possibility that interesting features and deposits await our investigation. The stones and rubble may simply be levelling deposits from the time of the broch construction. Even so, that would represent a priceless source of information about the first moments of setting-up the broch, which we think was undertaken around the 1st Century BC/AD.
The essence of our work in the broch this year, then, is to broaden out and excavate as much of the deposits in other parts of the broch interior. We also have key targets and aims to establish the truth of what form the broch originally took and how it was laid out.
These are highly important questions for understanding the nature of Iron Age Orkney. In the first half of the dig season, colleagues Amanda Brend and Chris Gee will take the helm within the broch to carry these exciting investigations forward.
In the village
We’ll also be back investigating the broch village this season.
The “extramural settlement” is important as we still don’t know as much about them as we would like. Although there’s no doubt that Iron Age villages can be contemporary with brochs, it’s not clear whether some villages were built at the same time as brochs, as planned entities, or whether village buildings developed more organically, a while after the establishment of the broch.
We want to know more about the relationships between the inhabitants of the broch and those of the village buildings.
In Scottish Iron Age studies, the consensus has been that the brochs represented the residences of high-status families who held economic and political sway over the village dwellers. An alternative scenario is that the entire community was on a more equal footing and the broch was a communal structure, where food was stored and feasting was undertaken, a symbol of the community’s solidarity and a projection of its power directed beyond the settlement toward the outside world.
It may be that a more subtle version of events, combining elements of both these models, is tenable. So, we’re going to concentrate our efforts on Structures O, and new discovery Structure T, which lie just outside and east of the broch entrance.
Presently, as indicated by our radiocarbon dating, Structure O appears to be a sub-rectangular building, contemporary with the broch. It has well-built, free-standing walls and, we suspect, was a substantial village house of the Middle Iron Age.
In 2023, we recovered several articulated animal skeletons from the rubble infill of the building, and we were able to define it on three sides, but the fuller outline of this building has continued to elude us because of the structural complexity of the site.
Last year, as we planned to reveal the whole footprint of Structure O, we found that the remains overlying it were better preserved, more substantial, and more complex than we had expected. No bad thing as it gives us even clearer insight into the 5th and 6th centuries AD at the site, but it did obscure the Structure O village building.
Here, atop the remains of O, lay a late revetment wall and slab floor with a small hearth. We think this late wall is part of a series of revetments, intriguing tiers of walling built around the eastern end of the broch ruins (the “broch mound”) during the 5th century AD.
Before proceeding to reveal the whole of Structure O and its detailed relationship with the broch, we must record and excavate this late episode.
Structure T sits even closer to the broch, between the broch wall face and Structure T, indeed. It came to light in 2023 with the work on the rubble and bone and shell midden outside the entrance of broch.
Structure T is a curving walled structure snug against the broch east wall and it may be a corridor space running around the wall face that connected the eastern part of the village complex with the buildings to the north of the village.
However, the area of Structure T we revealed last year appears to involve rather more space than similar corridor/passageways seen at celebrated Orkney broch sites such as Gurness and Howe, so it may have been a house structure in its own right, like one that was excavated at Crosskirk, in Caithness, in the 1960s.
Structure T also seems to have a soft clay floor deposit present, based on last year’s evidence and this suggests a roof would be required for such a floor to be viable in the Orkney weather, so again it maybe rather more than a simple unroofed passageway. It could therefore add lots more information to our pursuit of the role of broch-period villages.
Regular area supervisor Holly Young will take the lead in the village area of Structure O and Structure T.
Finally, in this zone we’ll be excavating overlying, “overburden” deposits to the north-east of the broch revealing the broch wall on this side of the structure but in doing so we also understand the sequence of events that led to the build-up of Late Iron Age deposits and features here. For example, within this area there’s a rather nice major stone slab framed by upright stones and stained red by direct heat appears to be a hearth or even the base of a furnace.
Last year, an intact charred oak post was excavated just a few from centimetres away from the big slab, so we need to investigate the fuller context of this as we go. This falls to Ross, one of our UHI MSc Archaeological Practice students this year, who is doing a period of professional placement with us.
In the south-east of the exterior of the broch we exposed a series of walls related to the cells making up part of Structure E.
Structure E is a late Iron Age or Pictish building of the 7th Century AD that made use of the platform left by the remains of the broch, which had long been abandoned by that time. These cells are a bit like one side of a figure-of-eight in plan. They’re well-built and well-preserved, standing about 50 centimetres in height thus far.
We’ll investigate these and see if we can see where the entrance into this cellular arrangement lies. Taking care of this zone will be Ole, another long-time member of The Cairns project.
Wags to riches
We also return to the Structure B complex this season.
The Structure B area is in fact no less than three sub-rectangular buildings with connecting corridor spaces that meant these buildings acted like an integral complex or suite of structures at various pints in their likely long history. These sub-rectangular buildings are examples of buildings similar to so-called “wags”, which are a form of post-broch Iron age period building found in large numbers in Caithness especially.
Our Structure B2 remains less fully explored than we wish, so this year we’ll excavate some of its infill rubble and reveal the central room of the interior, which we believe hosts a substantial hearth, possibly similar to the “mega-hearth” we previously excavated from next door building Structure B1.
Final thoughts
Overall, then, the key areas of attention this season represent a continuous zone of investigation running across our main trench from west to east. We’ll undertake smaller scale explorations of a few other areas and features as we go. In the main, however, we’ll concentrate our intensive focus on the broch and the heart of the site.
We’ll keep you posted on how we get on…
Martin Carruthers
Site Director
