The final entry
After 20 years of excavation, the UHI Archaeology Institute’s research dig at The Cairns has now come to an end. With the work on the site now completed, it’s time for site director Martin Carruthers to sum up…
On our last day on site, and the last day of the 20-year-long field project, we had a race against time to complete our tasks and deliver the final objectives of the project.
We have indeed managed to finish recording the many features, structures, and soils, and we can look forward to all the post-excavation work to come…
The broch
We have reached the natural glacial till across every room of the broch. We’ve therefore excavated the entire sequence of floors and occupation deposits across this monumental building. This is an achievement seldom accomplished, especially in the modern era of more careful and scientifically assisted excavations and all the procedures and diligence that comes with current excavation practice.
We can really look forward to amazing results from the post-excavation analysis but even on our last day the site threw a few surprises our way…
I got in on the act by finishing the excavation of the main entrance passage of the broch. Lifting some of the lowest pavement, revealed the natural till, meaning we’ve recovered the full sequence of floors and occupation here.
We were able to observe the details of the drain, which was itself mildly surprising because what is a substantial well-built, stone-lined culvert immediately outside the broch entrance, was a much more vague and quite narrow groove in the natural within the broch passage itself. We’ll need some time to process this and figure out how this drain was working as it passed under the broch floor slabs, but it’s good to have things to consider!
In the south-east room, Amanda, Scott and James finished off the last sampling and recording.
One surprise for Amanda was an extensive concentration of barley, clustered against the broch wall and sitting directly on the natural clay. There were hundreds of charred grains, and all were recovered. Apart from their intrinsic interest, a small sample of these provide an excellent opportunity to radiocarbon date the early occupation of the broch, complementing the construction dates we to obtain from the amazing pit found slightly earlier in the season, sitting partly under the broch wall outside. We have been very lucky on a site that simply just keeps giving!
In terms of artefacts, the star find must be what James found in the “aisle” area of the south-east room. Trowelling on to the natural in one of the grid squares, he was a bit shocked to see a flash of vivid green metal on top of the pinkish clay. He’d found a beautiful type of artefact that I had personally wanted us to find all along – a copper alloy (bronze) projecting ring-headed pin.
This beautiful piece of personal adornment was in three distinct pieces and will need cleaned-up and conserved to fully appreciate its form and detail, but you can already see it’s a very nice item and an important one to add to the list of relatively fancy objects from the broch interior.
Projecting ring-headed pins are a distinctive classic object of the Scottish Iron Age and together with the spiral finger/toe-rings, several other rings and pins, glass and amber beads, toggles, and the sword pommel (also found this year), they’re suggestive of the ways people in the broch expressed themselves and their identities using these shiny flashes of colour.
In the south room, Quin and Peter also remained hard at work. Quin was able to confirm the presence of the natural till here also, making it the last major zone of the broch to reach natural and, therefore, to confirm the full occupation sequence of the space. Peter finished the recording of the little south room cupboard in the edge of the room and revealed the earliest beautiful slab floor sitting on the natural clay.
In the north room, Thore was busy excavating the packing stones and sampling the clay above the roof of the well, and he was able to quickly expose the uppermost roof slab of the well chamber itself.
It’s very rare that an excavation team have been able to excavate and record the construction details of a broch-well, so this is great stuff – especially as we have a particular interest in the subterranean built structures of the Iron Age. Thore even managed to spot a piece of animal bone from the make-up of the packing stones, and this may be suitable for C-14 dating. This could give us a date close in time to the construction of the well, and quite likely therefore another date for the broch also – very good news!
In the west room, Jem took care of the final recording of the section through the earliest hearth and Jo was able to get her special Kubiena samples out of it. This should all add to the amazing detail we’re able to recover on the nature of the hearth use – what fuel was burnt on it and what sorts of foodstuffs were being cooked.
This will be invaluable as it will be comparable with the other three succeeding sequential hearths above this one, previously excavated.
An unusual broch…from the outset
This season has cemented our suspicion that the unusually complex nature of the partitioning of the broch interior was original and not pertaining to a later secondary phase of the broch. Reaching the natural in the central room has shown us that a single central hearth never existed in this broch, and that the relatively tightly confined central room was instead always a connecting corridor space between the broch entrance and its western and northern zones.
This information shows that our unusual layout was “baked in” from the outset, rather than a feature of some secondary refurbishment of the broch brought about as a response to ongoing changes in the household, or rival inheritance claims by different sections of the broch household as time went on. The compartmentalised layout was the way the broch at The Cairns was meant to be from its foundation.
This will be an extremely important conclusion for us to consider in all its possible dimensions and meanings, as well as something for future excavators to remain alert for, when excavating other substantial Iron Age roundhouses and brochs.
The layout of The Cairns broch may turn out to be not as unusual as we currently think, and a quick look at the back-catalogue of antiquarian excavations of other brochs shows that potentially similar layouts may have been encountered before, just not so well-preserved. It gives yet more food for thought as we enter the post-excavation stages of the project…
A changing village: changing relationships?
With Holly at the helm, we completed the grid-sampling excavation of the newly labelled Structure V – the building outside the door of the broch that had been heavily truncated by the construction of Structure O. The existence of this early building resolves at least part of the mystery of the somewhat unorthodox layout of our broch period settlement at The Cairns.
We had been struggling to consider what it meant that Structure O blocked any possibility of a central approach feature running-up toward the front door of the broch.
Normally, such features are common in Orcadian broch settlements, as they thread through an extramural complex of village buildings that share access to the broch via the central routeway. Think, for example, of the village layouts and central approach routes of the broch of Gurness or Howe, with their village doorways looking directly out on the central passage leading to the broch entry.
At The Cairns, however, we knew that Structure O sat astride such easy access and made it impossible for people in most of the village buildings to make a direct approach to the door of the broch. At the same time, we know from careful radiocarbon-dating, Structure O dates to the period when the broch was in use, so the question was simply what was going on here?
The existence of Structure V, no longer hidden beneath the Structure O slab floor, shows us that village life at The Cairns began in a manner similar to other Orcadian broch-villages, with houses either side of a central approach way to the “big house”. During the second stage of the broch occupation, however, things changed quite dramatically as Structure V was levelled and Structure O’s enclosed courtyard was “imposed” upon the frontage of the broch.
The exciting prospect before us now is to establish how we can use the post-excavation analysis to understand this major change in as much detail as possible.
We can try to figure out the most likely causes/circumstances of this changing dynamic. Was there major political transformation, affecting the relationships between those in the village complex and the inhabitants of the broch, which could be manifest in this change of layout?
Was this a move to aggrandise the broch inhabitants and distinguish them (further) from the rest of the village community, or was this a case of one particular group, or household, within the community, carving-out a more exclusive, one-to-one, relationship with the broch?
We shall await what clues emerge from the post-excavation analysis of the stratigraphy p the thousands of relevant animal bones, the artefacts, and the further radiocarbon-dating programme – for possible answers…
Elsewhere in the village buildings at the front of the broch, all the final sampling and recording of Structure T was completed, and beautiful drawings of the drain and sump finalised. It’s going to be very exciting to see what the huge quantity of very well-preserved animal bone from here can tell us.
Structure K and the furnace
The team, initially led by James Moore, were able to lift the entirety of the stonework making up the Iron Age furnace within the Structure K area.
The side slabs of the furnace were profusely coated in accreted vitreous metal waste. This is important for what it can tell us about the nature of metallurgical technology at The Cairns. Not only will we learn about the metal production itself but also understand a bit more of the earlier phase of activity, beneath Structure K, which we think stretches back into the broch period. We’ll therefore capture a flavour of both the post-broch jewellery-making episode here, and the metalcraft that preceded it.
West of the broch
Structure B2 was a focus for our work this season with Iain guiding the excavation here. The surviving floor deposits and hearth fills were all excavated on the sample grid much earlier in the field season than we anticipated (freeing up Iain and team members to redeploy to other areas and tasks during the final week of the season), and that allowed for some of the preceding features and layers to be explored too.
It will be interesting to see just how early some of these are. Overall, our ability to peer into the details of the sub-rectangular, wag-like buildings of Structure B will shed light on a rather neglected Iron Age settlement type.
South of the broch
In “the Cells” area, outside the southern wall of the broch, Ole led a team reaching the natural till under the floors of Structure U1, the building with the amazing surviving upstanding furniture.
Meanwhile, in nearby Structure U4, one of the later Iron Age cellular buildings, they also managed to reach the natural till, meaning we have recovered the complete surviving archaeological sequence in these remarkable buildings.
During the post-excavation work, we should be able to characterise the nature and history of these structures through time, giving us yet another insight into the village, running from the broch period to well beyond.
Finally…
There’s no doubt that completing the field phase of this long, complex excavation project brings very mixed feelings.
Twenty years of excavation work has been a considerable portion of my career in archaeology, and for many of the excavators who have graced the project by returning year after year, the work at the site each summer has probably become part of the rhythm of their lives too, both in work-terms as well as in their social lives.
The work of the site has threaded through the lives of everyone involved in the amazing effort to investigate this extraordinary Iron Age place.
In my own case, I can exemplify this by stating that when we began the project, I had no children and now I have two who are at High School (!), so on a personal level you can imagine how a long-term project like this is entangled in all the aspects of your life.
This isn’t the end of the project, of course, as we now move on to the full post-excavation phase. This will hopefully bring as many surprising, exciting, and important insights as the digging itself has. We will keep you informed about how this next phase of the project goes with regular updates and also opportunities for volunteers to get involved…
And now, as in previous years, some very heartfelt thank-yous!
I’ll take this opportunity to thank the entire project team across the weeks of the fieldwork for their unstinting good humour, patience, and enthusiasm. Without them, the site would remain unexcavated, and it’s only through their sterling efforts that we begin to understand what was going on at the site all those years ago.
This year, the public have visited the site as before. We benefited from large numbers of visitors, and they were very generous in their excitement and support for the project. Donations received will now be spent on important aspects of post-excavation work such as additional radiocarbon dating. I would like to thank all the visitors and donors, for allowing us to communicate our findings with them from the site.
Our funding bodies this season included The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, the Orkney Islands Council Archaeology Fund, and the UHI Archaeology Institute.
Finally, I would like to thank Charlie and Yvonne Nicholson, and all their family and friends in South Ronaldsay, for their many acts of assistance and generosity across the twenty years of the field work.
Our time at The Cairns excavations has been made possible, enjoyable, and very amiable, entirely due to their great kindness.
Thank you!
Martin Carruthers
Site director
