That’s the end of another season at Skaill, Rousay, after the third and final week. Project co-director Dan Lee provides a summary:
The final week at Skaill was busy, finishing off excavations inside the rectangular building, working on the internal floors of the dwelling house and making sure our recording was up to date. We work a short season, but get a lot done! The team were still excited by the amazing carved red sandstone head found last week – a remarkable find that captured everyone’s imagination and made global news!
The overall sequence of buildings in the main trench has been clarified further this year.
After the discovery of the rectangular building last year, this and the square building remain the earliest structures exposed so far in the eastern side of the settlement mound. Dating evidence suggests they could be at least 13th to 14th century in date.
It’s still unclear whether this medieval farm stood at the same time as the Norse hall in the western part of the settlement (not exposed this year) – a question that will require further dating and excavation.
The fine, red sandstone carved head has yet again demonstrated that high quality masonry is finding its way into later deposits in the farmstead and further strengthens the idea of a high-status Norse kirk at nearby St Mary’s, predating the existing kirk, that may have been connected to Sigurd of Westness.
Part of the challenge at Skaill has been to excavate the various internal floor surfaces and work out which related to the various modifications to the building complex. Numerous extensions and doorways were added and then blocked.
Internal floors vary from the huge, waterworn slabs with a central drain in the square building, to irregularly laid sandstone flags in the central room, to a sequence of partial earth and slab floors in the southern dwelling house. These have been carefully excavated and recorded, now reaching the earlier phases.
Whether you are excavating a Neolithic house at Ness of Brodgar or the internal floors at Skaill, it’s the same kind of surfaces and material (e.g. ashy layers, floor flags, hearth slabs), the same amazing Orcadian building stone, just used in slightly different ways over the millennia. Between the cracks in the floors, small personal items like a shell bead and child’s milk tooth were found.
An interesting find from the central room was a bullaun stone that had been reused as a door pivot stone. Postgraduate student Julia Wylie had been carefully excavating the doorway and found the stone and identified what it was. Bulluan stones are found in a range of contexts from domestic to religious. The Skaill example is very similar to one found in Iona.
The door blocking wall was removed between the square building and dwelling house, reuniting two spaces that had not been joined for centuries. A rounded stone with a pecked hollow was found incorporated into the blocking. Inside the square building, two later roughly built internal walls were removed opening the space out and revealing the full extent of the floor.
Hints of an even earlier floor are visible below and excavations in a corner recovered late medieval pottery.
In the rectangular building, the internal space had been rapidly filled with very loose rubble when the building was abandoned. Excavation revealed a very fine flagstone floor sealed by a layer of silt and with a late roughly built internal wall – similar to what was found inside the square building.
With a blocked entrance to the west, there must have been another way into the building. Hints of an entrance to the south were confirmed in an extension to the trench, with the fine flag floor continuing outside the building. Recesses inside the large doorway showed that there was a door frame.
A large wall abutting the southern side was part of an extension, with the fine flags representing an internal floor of yet another extension to the complex. To the north, a section down the side of the outside of the wall in Trench 20 revealed some in-situ burning and a shell midden, with deposits yielding animal bone suitable for radiocarbon dating. In the early phases, the farmstead at Skaill was a warren of interconnected buildings and rooms.
Another earlier building was also confirmed to the south of the dwelling house. A stone platform inside the house is in fact the end of an earlier structure, with a substantial wall heading south outside the trench and the remains of a returning wall continuing to the east alongside the rectangular building. Yet further evidence for substantial early buildings to the south and more indications of the considerable size of the early farm complex. It was down the side of one of these early walls that the carved stone head was discovered!
We’d like to thank the landowners for hosting us again, and the students and volunteers who worked so hard to make the season at Skaill such a success! We now start the process of washing and cataloguing the finds. Watch this space for updates.
Click here to download our updated info sheet detailing the Skaill farm site (PDF).
