Important findings and progress on site
Another very productive day, as we reached the end of the fourth week on site, that produced lots of finds such as pottery and stone tools. But the more exceptional finds included a lovely copper alloy spiral ring from the broch west room, discovered by Declan. This is the fifth such ring to come from the broch and is a really evocative indicator of the kinds of personal items worn by the Iron Age inhabitants of the settlement.
Also evocative, but in a slightly different way, was the steatite lamp in the south room, which was lifted from the ground today by Quin. It has a stubby little handle lug on one side to aid moving the quite heavy lighting device around.
A potentially highly interesting aspect of this find is its context. The lamp was placed in a little area of the room that we had left deliberately unexcavated until now, so it reflects a time-period at the very end of the broch when the broch was being decommissioned.
The soils here are highly burnt as is the adjacent broch wall-face. We can see that this is one of several small-scale fires that were lit against the base of the broch wall. These fires were apparently not out of control blazes but nevertheless quite destructive in their impact, generating localised cracking and scorching of the broch walls and they seem to have been part of the elaborate process of decommissioning the building.
The lamp from the south room is right amidst this late, burnt deposit and it’s quite cracked and burnt on its exterior surface as well as on the inside, so could this be the very device used to light this little example of arson?
A very important development in the central room of the broch was the lifting of the substantial paving there. We wondered if this might turn out to be the original, primary paving at the centre of the broch and, sure enough, as Jean trowelled over the soil exposed under the paving she fairly rapidly came on to the natural glacial till.
This is great news for our aim of fully excavating the floors and occupation deposits of the broch, but it’s also highly significant in that it very likely shows that there was no earlier phase of occupation within the broch involving a central hearth predating the more compartmentalised layout familiar to us all these years of the excavations.
That means the broch was originally laid out in this unusual, partitioned manner, baked in from the outset, rather than a more organic, and secondary set of modifications.
Elsewhere in the broch, now that they have completed the full excavation of the north-east room, Scott and SJ have been working in the adjacent large wall chamber, excavating and collecting soil samples from the occupation deposits, including for ‘sedDNA’, so we can take a look at the ancient DNA preserved in the soils.
In fact, they’ve been so efficient and effective that they rapidly completed this work and then moved over to bolster efforts to excavate the floors of the south-east room.
There, Amanda and James have been busy unravelling the sequence of floors and today, now reinforced by Scott and SJ, they managed to reach the base level of the broch wall and the natural glacial clay. Again, then, we have reached the very earliest activity in another major zone of the broch permitting us a slight sigh of relief that we are on target for completion.
Just time for some updates from other areas of the site for you…
You may recall the articulated animal carcass discovered by Julia in Structure O area on Thursday?
Well, today, we were lucky enough to be visited by UHI Archaeology Institute colleague Professor Ingrid Mainland, a zooarchaeologist, who was able to confirm the remains are that of pig. Moreover, what we had thought was a single animal is actually several. There are more bones than a single pig and it seems there are multiple leg-joints of meat deposited here.
Near the bones, Holly and team have been lifting sections of the Structure O courtyard paving and, in some cases, have revealed… even more paving!
This lower paving, though, seem even more substantial and very well laid, we wait with baited breath to see what will emerge and whether we will be dealing with an earlier, different layout to the Iron Age village.
Martin Carruthers
Site director
