A long-awaited event…
We thought we’d present you with a bit of a photo essay today for a change – less text and more images and videos instead.
I think most of these photographs speak for themselves, but you’ll see some of the variety of materials and contexts we encounter on a daily basis.
Quern and grinder
A highlight of today was a very long-awaited event.
For several seasons of the excavation now, we’ve been aware of a pair of beautiful stone tools set in the floor of the broch, in the north-east room. These are a saddle quern and a quern rubber, or top stone, set snug against each other and arranged on-edge near the broch interior wall face.
These were ready to lift today after all the deposits surrounding them were excavated by SJ. They were set on the natural clay under the lowest broch floor and seem to be a foundation deposit made during the very earliest stage of the broch.
It’s rare to recover a saddle quern with its top stone, so this is exciting, but also its context makes these stones very special for us, and we have been keen to see them in their entirety for a long time now, as previously we could not appreciate them fully.
In the video and photographs you can see SJ and Scott recovering these and also a shot of the stones after recovery, the rubber placed on the saddle quern for the first time in 2,000 years.
Sampling
Looking a bit like slices of chocolate gateaux, the images of the Kubiena tins with their soil sample contents are also important products of the excavation. These samples will ultimately be impregnated with resin and sliced into thin micro-slides that can be studied under a microscope to understand the development of the floors and occupation deposits within the broch.
These will provide invaluable insights into the micro-worlds of life in the broch, what conditions were like inside the building, how the spaces inside were used, and a myriad details.
Working wonders in the overburden area
To the north of the broch, the area sometimes called the “overburden” area has been developing over the last two seasons and we needed to make sense of this area in order to crystallise our understanding of this part of the settlement.
Today, the team worked wonders and the result was that previously disjointed sections of masonry became clearer and more intelligible.
There’s an early section of walling that seems likely to be part of Structure T and therefore one of the village buildings in the early phase of the settlement, contemporary with the broch. There’s also a later wall facing the opposite direction from the earlier. The later wall can now be seen to be a further extent of Structure O in its late manifestation.
Not only can we now see the relationship between the two walls more clearly but also that the construction of the late Structure O wall created a paved cellular space between the two walls.
It’s great to be able to resolve these details of the settlement through time and to flesh out the details of its layout.
Finally, our pictures of finds from today are just the tip of the iceberg of items that come to light each day of the excavation, from pottery sherds to antler-working waste, and not forgetting the pair of quern stones themselves.
Each one helps us glean a picture of Iron Age life two thousand years ago at The Cairns.
Martin Carruthers
The Cairns site director
