Over to Martin for a summary of this season’s work
The UHI Archaeology Insitute research excavation at The Cairns have come to an end for this year. With the site safely covered up, it’s time for site director Martin Carruthers to sum up…
Well, what a season it’s been, plagued by unseasonably wet and windy weather, but leavened by some amazing discoveries and startling finds!
In the broch
A major aim of the work in the interior of the broch this year was to try to explore more of the occupation deposits and features, and to determine if the complex layout of the interior was original or a secondary remodelling of the broch.
Progress in the different zones of the broch was led by Rick, Amanda, and Chris over the weeks.
In previous seasons, the north room was relatively “quiet” in terms of artefactual and faunal remains. This year, however, it was somewhat livelier!
Excavating the occupation on a grid, to maintain spatial control of the remains and residues, there was a lot of pottery, including large and sometimes decorated sherds. Perhaps this is a more accurate and representative indication of the nature of past activity in the north room.
We also found a more cohesive and extensive layer of slabs across the room showing that it was paved at one stage. The large chunks of pottery may be material preserved when change was afoot in the space and either the pottery sherds got trapped in the detritus of this change, or were deliberately deposited, perhaps during feasting, to mark a seminal change/remodelling of the room.
In the central room last year, we had encountered a red peat ash (context: 2495), which raised the possibility that there might yet be the remains of a central hearth lurking underneath the current broch layout. This could indicate an earlier phase involving a more orthodox broch layout, comprising a central hearth and perhaps a largely open interior at ground level.
This year, a stone setting also turned up in the central room, composed of a series of low upright stones, within which a series of artefacts and animal bones were deposited. Could it have been the side stones of the putative early central hearth?
Well, no, it now appears far more likely these stones represent chocking and propping for the nearby uprights of the central room of the main phase three layout of the broch interior. Meanwhile, the red peat ash now appears to be yet one more of the deposits forming within the central room as it abuts the main orthostats rather than being disturbed or cut by them.
The red ash is probably derived from a hearth elsewhere in the building and dates to a time when the physical layout of the building as we know it was up and running.
Importantly, then, it’s looking increasingly likely that our unconventional multi-partite divisioning within the broch was the original and primary way in which the broch was set out. This is extremely significant because older, antiquarian excavations have sometimes elucidated a similar and complex layout, as seen in older illustrations from that work.
Many modern archaeologists have tended to suggest that the antiquarian excavators got it a bit wrong and hadn’t managed to reach the earliest, primary floors and layout beneath. Most broch scholars also tend to think these, putatively secondary, bipartite and multi-partite layouts are a manifestation of the growth of households and rival inheritance claims within a burgeoning broch occupancy and that this led to increasing subdivision of space late in the life of the broch.
However, The Cairns broch appears to have a multi-partite layout from the outset of its construction and use. This is no secondary, ad hoc response to changing social circumstances but instead is “baked-in” to the Cairns broch from the outset. If that’s true, then I think it’s telling us that the ways in which the broch is laid out reflect changing circumstances in the structure of domestic life in the Iron Age at a much deeper, more profound level.
Let’s remember that for much of the Iron Age, it’s quite fair to say that house and home is their world. Changes in domestic arrangements are likely to reflect highly important social and cultural change underway at the heart of Iron Age communities…
In the south-east room, work continued from last year on the large hearth. The excavation showed that this had begun life as a large but shallow bowl-shaped pit set in the clay floor of the room.
Even now we have not yet reached the base of the pit, so we don’t know the precise details of its earliest use, but a long, complex “flue” feature that we found issuing from the south-east corner of the bowl-hearth seems part of the early use of the feature and may indicate more than a domestic hearth role.
At some point later, a nice stone-setting, or kerb, was set up to provide a focus and a neat, square base slab placed inside. This stage of the hearth seems divorced from the flue feature and perhaps this indicates the changing role of the hearth within the south-east room.
Later still, we know the hearth spread out well beyond the kerbed stone-setting phase and a new, much larger hearth base-slab was laid down and a series of rake-out deposits developed almost as far as the door threshold into the south-east room, located on the west.
These details show the nuance of life centred around the hearth in the south-east room during the first and second Centuries AD. Even more detail will come out of the detailed post-excavation examination of the materials and samples recovered during the excavation.
In the village: Structure O
The excavation of the later paving, revetment wall and associated hearth overlying Structure O freed up the building for fuller examination. It proved surprising! Holly led the way in O this year.
Since we already know, from our radiocarbon dates, that this building went out of use at the same time as the broch, we had expected the building to be organised around a village layout (seen at numerous other northern broch sites) of a long central passageway leading up through the village houses to the main door of the broch.
This layout is seen very clearly at the Broch of Gurness and was evident at the excavations at Howe, near Stromness, amongst many others.
As Holly and her team emptied more and more rubble from the area, however, it became clear our Structure O wasn’t conforming at all. In fact, it emerged that it was a very substantial structure straddling the front of the broch and completely blocking the way into the main door of the broch.
This unusual arrangement has parallels. Sites like Burroughston in Shapinsay, Netlater in Harray, and beyond Orkney: Yarrows broch in Caithness, all had some form of building or enclosure positioned directly outside the front door in such a way as would apparently obstruct access to the broch from any other part of the village complex beyond.
Again, like the complex multi-partite arrangement of the broch interior discussed above, these arrangements have often been thought of by recent archaeologists as late and very much secondary remodelling of the settlements during the late Iron Age. But, again, our scientific dating shows us this building was contemporary with at least some of the period of the broch. It’s another case where we may be able to refocus on much older excavations and use The Cairns to shed light on unusual building forms and arrangements that have been neglected and somewhat dismissed in modern archaeological syntheses.
By the end of the excavation season, Structure O was resolving on to some sort of surface composed of large slabs and dark organic soils. The stratigraphically earliest rotary quern yet discovered on site also emerged from this horizon and a beauty it was too!
There were also numerous signs that Structure O, as we understand it, is an amalgam of several different phases of construction with its north wall clearly an entire later addition, blocking off the fuller northern extent of the earlier stage of the building.
The curiously obstructive nature of the building may therefore turn out to be indeed late, though still clearly within the period of the broch. Perhaps at an earlier stage it gave more open access to the front door of the broch. We shall have to await next season to find out, but for now it presents us with another type of layout of a broch-period settlement to contemplate beyond those of the oft-presented, conventional types that form the basis of many a standard lecture on the settlement patterns of the Northern Iron Age, my own included!
I shall have to address this in the coming semester…
Wags to Riches: Structure B2
The work we undertook in the “Structure B zone”, a complex of three post-broch period buildings, was remarkably exciting.
Logan took the reins in Structure B this year and was ably assisted by a host of others, and throughout the four weeks by Quin. Our concentration on Structure B2 brought out lots of the architectural details of the building, like its fuller extent, the presence of a new wall-pier projecting into its interior, and the wall face of an entire cell, recessed into one of the structure’s long sides.
Additionally, the building yielded numerous faunal remains, worked antler, and pottery sherds.
Previous work in the Structure B phase buildings (c. AD 300 onwards) had indicated new forms of artefacts and practices appearing for the first time on site. The list includes new ceramic styles, the first appearance of gaming equipment, new strains of plants and animals, and the production of prestige jewellery items. These are indications that this was an innovative and outreaching period of the site.
This year’s star find from the Structure B complex amplifies this picture of an awareness of the wider world and of potentially long-distance relationships – the late Roman engraved glass vessel fragments. These are tiny fragments from a drinking vessel and might have been so easily overlooked if not for the skill of our excavators who recovered these in the field.
They may be small, but these shards carry a very important insight, out of all proportion with their size. Taken in themselves, they might be dismissed as simply glass fragments procured by native groups as oddities or trinkets, or at best “cullet” destined for recycling into enamel or paste for inlays (itself not too unimportant!).
However, here’s where insights from the broader pattern of glass from Northern Scottish Iron Age sites is enormously helpful.
The archaeologist Dominic Ingemark has shown (see: Glass Alcohol and Power in Roman… – National Museums Scotland Shop (nms.ac.uk)) how there is a selectivity evident in Roman glass from Northern Iron Age sites with a preference for drinking cups, bottles, and beakers (missing are the glass perfume bottles, lamps, and window glass that make up larger quantities of glass fragments found on actual Romanised settlements in Southern Britain).
If northern Iron Age groups were interested in Roman glass only for its recyclability, there would be no basis for this dominance of specifically high-status drinking vessels. Ingemark argues that these glass vessels were actively sought after in the north, that the social etiquettes around their use were understood, that access to exotic drinking paraphernalia was controlled by elites and used in formal feasting to present the status and prestige of those elites within their communities.
It’s a compelling argument, based on numerous finds from 80 sites across Iron Age Scotland in the first four or five centuries AD. The Structure B complex at The Cairns seems to follow the pattern and should allow us to say something more about the detailed character of these putative emerging elites on the northern periphery of the late Roman empire.
The Overburden Zone
On the northern periphery of the broch, we needed to address an area that has until now been left high in comparison to surrounding areas and has been getting out of synch with the rest of the site until this year.
The overburden zone served to do two things for us. On the one hand, there were a series of discrete features apparently associated with a large post-broch furnace base slab, and on the other: in excavating these features we were able to reduce the rubble and overburden against the broch wall and obtain a fuller appreciation of the sweep of the broch wall.
Ross, who is undertaking a placement with The Cairns as part of his MSc Archaeological Practice Masters degree, took charge and delivered very fine outcomes. There remained far more detail in the upper features than was expected and these could be seen to be very late uprights and packing, perhaps for little outdoor features related to the metalworking implied by the big heat affected slab.
Meanwhile the stretch of broch wall face was looking very bonny by the time work concluded in this zone.
In ‘The Cells’
The final zone of excavation on site this year followed up on the work begun last year on the south-west margin of the main trench, in an area known as “the cells”. Once again, Cairns-stalwart, Ole oversaw the work here.
This zone of post-broch period buildings with curving walls has surprised us with its depth and the amazing levels of architectural preservation. We had previously detected that this zone was multi-phased and represented the development of several sequential buildings.
This year, yet another sub-circular building came into very clear focus (Structure U4), showing there are no fewer than a minimum of 4 major phases wrapped up in the cells zone. Structure U4 was our main focus this year, as it became clear it was the latest of the U-series and the needed attending to first on stratigraphic grounds.
After the removal of large volumes of rubble and animal bones, an even more massive amount of animal bone was found spread out across one of the lower rubble surfaces within the structure.
Some of the bone remained semi-articulated in the ground, much of it from very substantial cattle. Overall, deer, sheep, horse, and pig were present.
The bones appear to be the remains of feasting, probably marking the end of the building. Nearby, lay even more articulated groups of bones including the skeleton of an entire pig, excavated this year.
It seems there was some formality to the activities marking important points of change at this end of the site.
These remarkable faunal remains will add immensely to the understanding of animal management, food consumption and social practices in the late post-broch period of the site, and beyond.
And finally…
Altogether, and despite the unseasonal weather (even for Orkney!), it has been a very fruitful and enjoyable season, with a lot learned about the nature of the site, from the early use of the broch to the late Iron Age structures.
Major features of the site such as the broch floors, the contemporary village, and middens will help us to understand the character of the settlement, and the finds this year have been very rich and useful in elucidating issues relating to dating, the status of the community and depositional practices.
Now, some thank-yous!
I’ll take this opportunity to thank the entire project team across the four main weeks of the fieldwork, for their unstinting good humour, patience, and enthusiasm. Without them, the site would, of course, remain unexcavated, and its only through their sterling efforts that we begin to understand what was going on at the site 2,000 years ago.
This year the public have visited the site as before. We benefitted from a large number of visitors, and they were very generous in their support for the project.
Donations will now be spent on important aspects of post-excavation work, such as additional radiocarbon dating. I would like to thank all the visitors and donors, and for allowing us to communicate our findings with them from the site.
Our funding bodies this season included the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, the Orkney Islands Council Archaeology Fund and the UHI Archaeology Institute.
Finally, I would like to thank Charlie and Yvonne Nicholson and all their family and friends in South Ronaldsay for their many acts of assistance and generosity. Our time at The Cairns is made possible, enjoyable, and very amiable, entirely due to their great kindness.
Thank you!
Martin Carruthers
Site director
