A fine day for some enigmatic discoveries
A fine day of dry calm weather for Friday, to end our third week on site brought smiles aplenty, especially with lovely finds and progress being made across the site. Here are just a few of the findings…
One of today’s highlights was the discovery and excavation of a beautifully carved stone bowl, or small lamp, from the broch’s west room. It is broken in half and heavily sooted/stained on the outside. Mabli recovered the object, which was resting tightly up against one of the slab partitions of this room.
The find spot of the bowl/lamp (left) and Mabli with the excavated artefact. (📷 Martin Carruthers/Rick Barton)
Ultimately, we will try to perform residue analysis on the vessel to see what substances it may have contained, or used to process, whether that is some type of lamp oil or a different content altogether. It was a fitting farewell reward to Mabli, whose last day it was with us on site.
Also in the broch, in the south-east room, Amanda got to finally excavate a little object that has been tantalising her for some considerable time.
At the edge of the big hearth there are all sorts of quite substantial stone-lined sockets and features, but there’s also a small stake-hole with some sort of unidentifiable bone item projecting vertically from it.
The time was right today to excavate this little feature and, in the process, recover the bone item, which we dutifully did. I wish I could say we are now clear as to what the bone item definitively is, but it’s incompleteness (parts have been broken off in antiquity) and its enigmatic character leave questions.
It is a beautifully carved piece of antler and looks very similar, in some ways, to the well-known long-handled combs of the Iron Age period, (of which we have some fantastic examples from site), but if it is such a comb, the teeth have been removed prior to pressing it into the ground within the feature.
What remains present are several little linear markings in a horizontal and vertical arrangement. Again, this kind of decoration technique is like ones we find on carved bone combs from the period, so maybe it is a comb fragment perhaps deliberately inserted into the edge of the hearth at the end of this stage of the fireplace in the south-east room.
Perhaps we can be more definitive once it’s fully cleaned up and examined.
Kathryn and the perforated femur and a closer view (right). (📷 Martin Carruthers/Holly Young)
Another fascinating bone item was unearthed from outside the broch.
In Structure T, Kathryn and Tim have been continuing to excavate the substantial shell and animal bone midden deposited her in the last moments of the building. Among the profuse bone and shells Kathryn spotted a femur head, the ball joint of the tip of a mammal thigh bone. This was no ordinary femur head though. It has clearly been deliberately cut or sawn from the long bone and then perforated.
Sometimes in the Iron Age and Norse periods, femur heads were detached in this manner and then shaped and perforated into objects that look just like spindle whorls. In fact, occasionally, (such as at Icegarth in Orkney, and Crosskirk broch in Caithness) there are even human femurs treated in this manner!
The perforated femur head discovered by Kathryn has not been fully shaped and made into the classic whorl shape and some of the top of the shaft of the long bone remains, so it seems inherently unwieldy as a spindle whorl, but this means there is more bone surviving to identify to species.
We hope to find out lots more about the object very soon, but it should be remembered, perhaps, that the midden deposit from which the pierced femur head came also formed part of the “Elder” deposit that contained a human female jawbone placed in somewhat formal circumstances…
We’ll keep you further updated on all of the progress on site next week.
Martin Carruthers
Site director
