Week one update from the dig director
I thought I’d give a roundup of progress and developments at the end of week one of the project, (the first week of six weeks that we will be on site for this last ever season at The Cairns).
In the broch
Large parts of the broch have been the scene of intensive excavation across much of the floor space of the building. Our ultimate aim is to excavate all the occupation and floor deposits from the broch and recover 100 per cent of the excavated sediments to examine back in or labs. This will maximise the amount of information we can possibly obtain about Iron Age life in this monumental structure.
In the west room, Rick’s team have been working nearby the big hearth-mound, excavating some of the earliest floors and occupation deposits here. It’s here that last year we discovered two bronze spiral finger rings and a perforated bone mount and, this week, Travis discovered another such perforated antler mount just to the south.
These objects appear to be edge-binding that was pegged in place on large composite bone or wooden pieces creating the frame for boxes or caskets perhaps, or even for furniture such as stools.
Further south, still in the little “west bay” Jemima has been excavating the dark, organic occupation deposits that were previously heavily sealed by layers of paving slabs. It seems this sealant has promoted the survival of waterlogged conditions preserving wood fragments, leaf-litter, and even hair fibres!
This waterlogging echoes something of the remarkable organics that we previously found in the deep well in the north room of the broch and offers a striking insight into the organics that don’t usually survive on terrestrial archaeological sites. This material will be extraordinarily informative about conditions that prevailed inside the broch 2,000 years ago and we’ll take additional soil samples here to obtain information from ancient sedimentary DNA.
In the north room, Thore and Graham continue to work away on the earthen and slab floors and, of course, one result of this has been Graham’s discovery of the (likely whale tooth) sword/dagger pommel. This is a beautiful artefact, highly polished and originally part of a very prestigious object.
Swords don’t seem to have been ten-a-penny in the Iron Age. It’s a sobering reminder of the martial power and violent potential of sections of the Iron Age community and its discovery inside the broch is very interesting, adding to the list of likely personal objects from here, that includes many glass beads, bronze spiral rings, pins, and toggles. It does seem that the broch was an arena where flashy objects were on show that conveyed identity and status.
In the north-east room, Associate Professor Scott Timpany has continued to record the fantastic vivid peat deposits here. This room may have been a peat store as recent post-excavation work that we’ve been conducting seems to indicate.
In the south-east and south rooms, Amanda and her team have been pushing on with the job of dealing with the earliest floors and features. Within the south-east room itself, Amanda has been resolving details of the large hearth-pit with its various complex stone settings.
The use, or reuse, of saddle quern fragments, set on their edges, for several of these hearth-settings suggests that the hearth furniture sported heirloom items perhaps representing the longevity and ancestry of the household.
Meanwhile, tiny copper alloy fragments recovered from the soils filling the hearth, may be flakes from objects used with the fireplace, perhaps indicating bronze vessels were heated on the hearth as well as pottery ones.
In the next-door south room, Quin and Matthew have been excavating rich organic occupation which contain lots of animal bone and shell. The whalebone disc that Matthew found here is a reminder of how much marine animal material has been previously unearthed from both the South and Southeast rooms.
Outside the broch’s front door
Outside the broch, near to its entrance, a wide belt of remains of a complicated assortment of different eras have been the subject of our work, led by area supervisor Holly. This area is sometimes referred to as the “Frontage” zone as it surrounds the entrance to the broch and represents lots of intense activity that has included major broch-period village buildings; substantial shell middens, human remains, a well-built souterrain, a massive shell-filled pit, later post-broch Iron Age houses, enigmatic areas of paving and kerb-walls, and Pictish middens to name just a few of the elements present.
It is as if the broch exerted massive influence during its life, and also for long afterwards, and that this front area, near its entrance, was a special focus for centuries of recurrent activity.
So far, in week one, nearest the broch itself, Holly, Craig, Alex, and Declan (often aided by have been and our finds supervisor Kev, have been revealing more of the extensive paved surface of Structure O, a large walled courtyard immediately outside the front door of the broch.
In previous years, we have picked up some isolated stretches of drains, their capstones flush with the paved surface, and now these are beginning to resolve into a connected network that runs out from the broch doorway and also round the circumference of the foot of the broch wall.
This work is also simultaneously revealing more of the beautifully constructed broch outer wall face, especially around its entrance, making for a spectacular view of the broch exterior and associated features. We can also now appreciate that masonry columns built just around and just inside the entrance supported an outer door way, meaning the broch entrance was double-doored with this outer one and an inner one further along the five metre-long entrance passage.
A key structure in this front zone of the site is Structure T, one of the village buildings on the north-east exterior of the broch.
Kathryn, Alex, Declan, and Dan have been dealing with the destruction levels of this building so far and our hope is to excavate these quickly and get to any original surviving floor deposits in the building in order to sample them, so wish us luck in moving fast in here. Already, the building is full of animal bone, and one particular cache of shell and animal ribs that appear to have been placed in a manner suggesting it might have been something of a closing deposit marking the end of the building.
Quite commonly, we encounter a range of items, including very modest sorts of objects; animal remains, and artefacts, deposited at crucial times in the life of buildings during the Iron Age so the shell cache could be quite minor, but semi-formal, deposits used to mark the ending of the building (one of dozens of such deposits around the broch exterior and interior) or it could be an entirely spontaneous moment of discarding the remains of a “working lunch” as a small group of the paused during the work of the demolition process, fed themselves, and placed the remains of their quick repast in an appropriate place before carrying on their arduous but important task. Or it might be a little bit of both those scenarios.
Again, these bones provide excellent radiocarbon dating potential, however, just as importantly I think, they also give us some insights into the procedures that were taken during the closure of the broch, and the strong likelihood that feasting was a key component of the attendant activities for the particular generation of Cairns villagers who ended the broch.
Meanwhile, the work of processing the many finds from the site has been led by Kev. He’s been cataloguing each artefact as it comes out of the ground to build up our visual database of the pottery, stone tools, bone tools, and the rest.
On the south-west exterior of the broch, Ole has begun the process of establishing a clearer sense of the relationships and history of Structure U1. Readers may recall this spectacular building with an intact chamber set in its wall and a triple-decker cupboard from last season.
Well, this building is indeed a visual feast, but more importantly we now need to establish how it related to other elements of the broch village. We have a suspicion that it may yet turn out to be actually the same building as Structure J just a little further round to the west of the outside of the broch wall. That being the case would make this Structure U1/J a very large village building, indeed.
Structure B: The Wag
Finally, in the sub-rectangular Wag-like Structure B2, where Iain has been guiding the progress of excavations, our team of Shreevats, Pip, Kim, Emma, and Jan, have been excavating the floor deposits on a sample grid.
Pottery, little groups of stone tools, and a nice assortment of animal bone have been unearthed from the area so far. We’re very lucky here to have any sort of “soft” earth floor, or occupation deposits, to excavate and understand because many post-broch period buildings in Orkney have floors that are largely solid slabbed and not much in the way of occupation evidence other than a few hearth fills.
The implication of this situation is that during the Late Iron Age, (after the demise of the brochs), people maintained very well-swept house interiors and generally kept them scrupulously clean of any build up. For us archaeologists then, the promise of an unusually organic-rich, domestic occupation is fantastic because we will hopefully be able to reflect on the different task zones of the building, as well as the types of food eaten and the local environment during the time that the building was occupied.
Already some of these samples have been taken back to the UHI Archaeology Institute in Kirkwall, where Cecily and archaeology students have been processing the samples, so we will have some information about what environmental evidence these floors contain while we’re actually digging on site.
Additionally, we mustn’t forget this is the building, which, two seasons back, yielded tiny fragments of a beautiful late Roman drinking vessel of engraved glass, so you never know what else may be unearthed here or found in the soil samples…
Altogether, it’s been a fantastic first week on site with another five weeks still to go!
Join us for daily updates and images from the excavations…
Martin Carruthers
Site director
