Open day, drains and hearths…
Just a quick update today as our time was mostly spent on the open day.
The open day itself was fantastic – lots of visitors on site enjoying the beautiful Orkney sunshine, views of the blue skies and sea, and, of course, The Cairns archaeology in all its many and varied manifestations.
Visitors were treated to views of the broch and the village settlement buildings. They could look at artefacts such as pottery, stone tools, querns, bone mounts, and animal bones with our finds supervisor Kev and ORCA colleague Sean Bell.
Inside the site cabin, in our on-site laboratory facilities, the public were able to look at 2,000-year-old charred plant remains, including barley grains from the broch, under the microscope with Associate Professor Scott Timpany of the UHI Archaeology Institute.
Despite how busy we were showing the site to visitors, there was time also for further progress on site.
Right outside the broch, on his last day of digging with us on site, Dan uncovered slabs that seem to run around the base of the broch wall. These are probably capstones belonging to a drain and may also have provided a flagstone surface around the front of the broch: an important indicator that we are reaching at least one of the early surfaces just outside the broch.
If these slabs are drain capstones, then, ultimately, they may well link through to the big drain we found running out of the broch entrance and into the culvert through the base of Structure O’s wall – part of a substantial system of drains across the broch and settlement.
Meanwhile, between leading tours, Amanda still managed to put in some work on the main hearth on the south-east room of the broch interior. The hearth is now resolving into a bowl-shaped, cut feature that the early inhabitants of the south-east room seem to have cut into the clay, earthen floor.
It’s really useful and intriguing to see this departure from the way hearths were made elsewhere in the broch, such as in the west room, where we have hearth slabs that are level with the floor surface, one after the other, building up as a great hearth-mound over time. It’s one more instructive clue as to how the different rooms of the broch were operated differently.
The south-east room, for instance, has always stood out in terms of its beautifully laid clay floor and the clay-rendered mural chamber walls that were accessed via the room, whereas, elsewhere, in the other rooms of the broch, floors were either slabbed or simply the swept out charcoal and organic waste from the hearth and vivid ash from the hearths. Now the bowl-style hearth in the south-east room adds to the sense that that room had a quite different quality of space.
Elsewhere in the broch, Neil and Jem have been excavating a fairly substantial cluster of pottery smashed apparently in situ on the broch floor near the wall or even swept towards the wall.
Also, nearby they uncovered something very important. As they excavated the lower occupation deposit here, they began to come down on to widespread natural, the glacial till, and the foot of the broch interior wall face.
This natural clay would have last saw the light of day when the original builders substantially landscaped the site in preparation for the construction of their broch. For us, this is highly significant. Along with similar natural clay visible all across the north-east room this year, it signals we are dealing with the earliest deposits within the west room, and, in practical terms, means we can see the light at the end of the tunnel for our key excavation aim of excavating the entirety of the surviving occupation and floor deposits within the broch before we complete the excavations next year. Very, very good news indeed!
Martin Carruthers
The Cairns site director
