The half-way mark…
We have reached the half-way point of the excavation season at The Cairns, so it’s time to reflect on progress and prospects.
In this dig diary, we’ll do that, with a little Friday focus on the broch itself. We will follow up on this soon with another instalment that pays attention to the wider settlement at large, beyond the broch.
SJ, Liz, and Scott have made tremendous progress in the north-east room taking the occupation deposits down to natural pinkish glacial till across the majority of the zone, except for a small section in the east of the room that they have deliberately left high and which contains, in profile, information on the full sequence of deposits from the earliest foundation to the last gasp of activity in the room.
This section will now be further sampled using Kubiena tins to capture solid blocks of soil profile that can be inspected at the microscopic level.
The natural till slopes slightly to the east confirming what we have thought for some time – that the original floor of the broch was set on a slight slope in that direction due to the way the builders originally “scalped” the hillside to accommodate the broch.
Lying directly on the natural clay, but engulfed in an additional yellow construction-clay, was a pair of querns – a beautiful lower stone and what appears to have been its top-stone, a quern-rubber. These must have been placed when the room was initially set up for its first period of use and represent another foundation deposit marking the commencement of the broch as a building.
Interestingly, the stones respective grinding surfaces were placed to face away from each other. Did this signal the end of their role as working tools and their new status as built-in heirlooms of the household?
Also set in the natural are the remains of sinuous linear features composed of small edge-set stones. It’s not clear yet what these may be and whether they relate to activities immediately around the construction of the broch or if they represent features that were in use during the first flush of activity, once the building was initially up-and-running. Further excavation will hopefully, tell us.
In the broch’s south-east room, Amanda has led a small band of excavators in unravelling the incredibly complex hearth deposits here. The hearth had multiple iterations, an ash box and various settings and features over time. Each stage of the hearth activity has served to almost removes traces of the last, however, not quite. And it’s within that “not quite” zone that we will hopefully manage to get a handle on the history of the hearth of the south-east room.
The Antler mount with its pegs. (📷 Martin Carruthers)
A slightly surprising, and very welcome, little find turned up yesterday in a silty organic deposit lying against the edge-set stones of the hearth. This was a fragment of a perforated antler mount, complete with its in situ bone pegs.
The pegs are pointed and sharpened implying that they would be affixed firmly to the surface of another object of bone or wood. It would seem that the object was originally something like a frame or edge-binding, part of a composite object such as a box or a frame.
In previous excavations of major roundhouses and brochs, the northern interior zones have often been found to be a relatively “quiet” space with few artefacts and signs of activity. This has sometimes led to this space being interested as storage and/or for sleep.
In the case of The Cairns north room, however, thus far there’s been a considerable volume of animal bones and large numbers of artefacts, including pottery, especially decorated pottery, and of unusual styles for the Northern Isles.
The latest pottery find came on Friday with Thore’s discovery of a medium-sized pottery spread located on the floor near to the entrance to the well. This looks for all the world like most of a whole pot broken in situ.
The truly eventful and actively inhabited nature of the north room is perhaps even more strongly indicated by the emergence of a heavily heat-affected hearth base slab in the middle of the room with accompanying charcoal rich organic soils.
In the west room, Chris, Bev, and Jem have been tackling the major hearth mound there. It’s a large bump in the surface of the room and made up of masses of ashy and organic deposits, a riot of colours and textures apparently edged on two sides by a large stone-setting.
Once we have excavated more of the spill-over spread of ash, I suspect the stone-setting will ultimately be found to surround the majority of the hearth area. This hearth looks to be one of the early ones of the room, if not the earliest, and it will hopefully reveal new information about the use of the west room, which so far seems to have been the scene of major food preparation and consumption.
Elsewhere in the west room, Travis has been excavating several articulated and semi-articulated groups of animal bone. These must have been placed on the contemporary surface of the broch while significant flesh and sinew was still attached.
This is not a new phenomenon for The Cairns. Overall, we have recovered more than 30 such Associated Bone Groups (ABGs) from the site and it’s something seen across Iron Age Britain. Whole or parts of animals are laid down at momentous times in the lives of communities, apparently during the foundation, renewal/refurbishment, or closure of buildings.
These ABGs therefore not only represent a window on certain types of Iron Age practices, beliefs, and customs but their relative completeness also provides a picture of the lives of the animals themselves (e.g.: their condition, health, size, mortality), which is much more sharply in-focus for having larger components of the carcass available to study.
The fact that much of the articulated animal bone currently turning up in the west room is red deer, including an entire leg and foot, is also in keeping with the remarkable volume and condition of this animal that’s come from the broch, and the west room in particular, over the excavation seasons.
Over the following weeks we will excavate much more of the broch floors and branch out into other zones across its floor plan, including the south room and the central room. We will keep you posted on what this tells us about life in that great house at The Cairns 2,000 years ago.
Martin Carruthers
The Cairns site director
