Today was certainly a mixed one in terms of the weather, and the team worked through very warm sunshine and some really torrential rain showers as well! But results were well worth the labour!
Spirit unabated progress continued in the trenches. In the broch, the team have been excavating the lowest rubble deposits from the western half of the interior, revealing patches of tantalising black organic occupation material here and there. The hope is that once some more of the rubble has been removed we will see that the greater portion of the area is taken up with this nice deposit so that we can then begin to excavate in a strategic manner on a grid, taking many soil samples for analysis.
Even the rubble, though, has significant points of interest. For example, Kath, one of our degree students found a nice sizeable chunk of whalebone set in the rubble snug against the broch inner wall face. There are also other little bone finds in here too, such as a sheep jawbone, shells and occasional stone tools. It appears that even the rubble infill relating to the abandonment of the broch (about the middle of the 2nd Century AD), apparently contained deliberate little deposits of items, a phenomenon we have previously witnessed in other zones of the broch infill.
Meanwhile in Trench Q, during our exploration of the extramural features around the outside of the broch on the north and east side we found quite thick blankets of silty soils and light rubble that contain a lot of artefacts and environmental remains. Hannah has been finding some chunky cattle bones, for example, and there has been a lot of pottery, including a nice sherd with decoration in the form of applied diagonal pellets under a nice rolled rim. This decorated pottery is Middle Iron Age in date and therefore roughly of the period of the broch, however, in this case it probably dates to a time just after the broch was abandoned.
In the western edge of Trench Q, Charlotte and Therese have been cleaning up in our furnace area, a feature we believe is associated with iron-working. Intriguingly, they have been finding articulated animal bones on the edge of the furnace zone, and this is in an area where we previously found a large pig skull that was severed clean off its body with a substantial edged object, most likely a metal blade! It seems likely that there are also special deposits in and around the furnace!
With the bursts of heavy rain our south-west extension became effectively unworkable with its spreads of clay and thick silty soils, so the part of the team that had been working there, migrated into the broch to help the others and progress in the last part of the afternoon was good.
Tomorrow, with the help of good weather, (fingers and toes crossed!), we should be able to reach our goal of establishing the uppermost occupation deposit across the western interior of the building- then the fun begins!
Martin Carruthers, Site Director
Elsewhere on the site Therese and Charlotte cleaned up the furnace in Trench Q, and in the process found some articulated bone – a hopeful sign of even more interesting finds in this area. In the finds tent Kevin and Kathryn reported surprisingly large amounts of pottery coming from all areas of the site – more than has been found in previous seasons – as well as a Skaill knife (a stone blade used in butchery and scraping hides, etc.).
Hi folks, Martin again, reporting on progress during day two of the project.
Nearby, Kath, another of our degree students found a really nice piece of pottery with a ‘rolled’ rim, which is, again suggestive of a date in the earlier part of the Late Iron Age.
All, in all, considering it was a day largely given over to preliminary clean-up we have had a very nice set of finds and together with the feature and deposits we are encountering they are helping us to formulate the story of the site, yet further.
A previously unknown, probably prehistoric site, located 180 metres to the south-east of The Cairns was brought to light in a shallow test pit containing ashy midden and a stone setting, possibly a remnant wall. Not visually spectacular at this stage but highly significant in our ever-expanding awareness of the landscape around The Cairns. Finds were few but a fragment of a saddle quern came out of the ashy soil and hints that the site is prehistoric. This ‘new’ site aligns to one e
As each day passes, post-excavation work at The Cairns broch site in South Ronaldsay provides us with more clues concerning the working lives of the people who lived there two thousand years ago.
swords and knives. It’s possible that this was such a composite part of that kind of object, but any kind of diagnostic feature is missing due to the breakage pattern. It might have been part of a composite object that’s been stripped down for recycling the metal and the whale tooth was discarded, or it may have been destined for such an object but broke before it could be finished. A third possibility is that it was intentionally deposited as part of the ending of the metalworking phase in Trench M.”
