Excavation resumes at the Ness of Brodgar tomorrow, Monday, June 24, with the dig running until August 23.
This, the final season of fieldwork, is open to the public from Wednesday, June 26, until Friday, August 16.
The Ness Neolithic complex occupies a central position within the Orkney archipelago, lying between the lochs of Stenness and Harray, among the county’s best known prehistoric monuments.
This year marks the 21st anniversary of the site’s discovery – in a field half-way between the Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar. Since then a project managed by the Ness of Brodgar Trust, in partnership with the UHI Archaeology Institute, has uncovered an incredible array of monumental structures (3300-2300BC) and a biography spanning millennia – from traces of Mesolithic (9000-4000BC) activity to the site’s Neolithic heyday, through to the early Bronze Age (2500-800BC) and a later episode of use in the Iron Age (800BC-AD800).
At its zenith, around 3100BC, the Ness was dominated by huge, free-standing buildings flanked by a pair of massive stone walls.
This was much more than a domestic settlement: the size, quality, and architecture of the structures, together with evidence for tiled roofs, coloured walls, and over 900 examples of decorated stone – not to mention the rich assemblages of artefacts recovered from them – all add to an overall sense of the Ness being special in some way.
Archaeologists and diggers from all over the world will be heading to Orkney to take part in the dig – tying up loose ends across the site before the trenches are backfilled in August.
This will involve checking all site records to ensure they are 100 per cent accurate as well as further recording the structures – planning, photographing and documenting them from every angle, and create new 3d models in even greater detail.
It may be the final dig season, but there are plans to re-open an old trench to further investigate an early stalled building, Structure Two, which was revealed in 2005.
It pre-dates the later piered buildings in Trench P (c. 3100BC) and the goal is to more of Structure Two, reach its occupation deposits and hopefully get dates to see whether it is contemporary with Structure Five, the earliest excavated building on site (c. 3300BC).
Elsewhere on site, work will concentrate on finishing the excavation of all the structures’ primary floor levels and, at the same time, look for more evidence of earlier buildings.
As always, a daily dig diary will run at www.nessofbrodgar.co.uk, so keep an eye on it for updates.
The excavation is open to the public, on weekdays, between Wednesday, June 26, and Wednesday, August 16. Open days will take place on July 14, and August 4, on site and in the Stenness school.
Although digging ends this year, the Ness of Brodgar project continues with the vital post-excavation phase.
Excavation is the most visible aspect of archaeology and perhaps seen as the most exciting. But it’s just one part of the process and post-excavation is just as important – drawing together the many hundreds of thousands strands of evidence to refine what we know about the Neolithic site.
