Professor Colin Richards will deliver the David Drever Memorial Lecture at the 2026 Orkney Archaeology Festival tomorrow evening, Thursday, September 10.
The subject is Professor Vere Gordon Childe, who excavated and consolidated the remains of Skara Brae from 1927 until 1930. Initially, Childe thought the settlement was Iron Age but, some years later, when it became clear that the pottery was much earlier Skara Brae placed in the Neolithic…
Childe’s interpretation of the site saw him create an inaccurate, but tenacious, vision of Neolithic life that persists in some quarters today, including the notion that the sudden and “hasty desertion” of the settlement in the face of an apocalyptic calamity.
V. Gordon Childe, Skara Brae and Neolithic Orkney: research and redemption begins in the King Street Halls, Kirkwall, at 7pm, and is free to attend.
