The Ancients - Art of Neolithic Orkney

Episode Date: September 18, 2022

Located in the Northern Isles of Scotland, Orkney is a remote and wild environment. With over 5000 years of history, this small archipelago of islands is a treasure trove of ancient sites and secrets.Today Tristan is joined by Archaeologist Dr Antonia Thomas to talk about the art in some of the incredible sites and excavations across Orkney. Touching on famous locations like Skara Brae, or the legendary tomb Maeshowe, what can neolithic art tell us about the lives of the people who lived there 5000 years ago?For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, well, we're going to the north of the British Isles. We're going to an island, a group of islands, that has a remarkable prehistory. In the Iron Age, in the Bronze Age, but most famously in the Stone Age, in the Neolithic. I am, of course, talking about Orkney.

Recently, History Hit, myself and a small team of people from History Hit, including Annie and Matt, well, we headed up to Orkney to film a documentary. A documentary all about Orkney's Neolithic past but also looking at this Iron Age as well. It's got some fantastic brochures up there. All of that is coming to History Hit soon for our upcoming, I'm very excited about this, our upcoming prehistoric Scotland series. Stay tuned for all of that. We've got a podcast to whet your appetite in the meantime though because we've got one of our contributors from this upcoming series with us on the podcast today. Her name is Dr Antonia Thomas. She is an archaeologist, she focuses in on prehistoric art, she's done a lot of work on Neolithic Orkney,

on Neolithic art, on the early farmers in Neolithic Orkney. She's a wonderful speaker. It was great to have her on the TV program and it was great. It was a must to get Antonia on the podcast following that. And in this episode, Antonia goes into detail about what we know about art in these Neolithic communities, societies that dwelled on Orkney, on the islands of Orkney, some 5,000 years ago. And we're going to be mentioning some big names. We're going to be mentioning the best preserved Neolithic settlement in Western Europe, Skara Brae. settlement in western europe scarabray we're going to be talking about legendary tombs such as mace howe and the extraordinary excavation still ongoing at the nes of brogda one of the most remarkable excavations on the british isle stay tuned we've got future podcasts on the nes of brogda coming in due course this is the first of our prehistoric scotland podcasts we'll be doing

more in the weeks ahead i can guarantee you that i've got a soft spot for Prehistoric Scotland podcast. We'll be doing more in the weeks ahead, I can guarantee you that. I've got a soft spot for Prehistoric Scotland because it is so amazing. But that's enough rambling on from me. Without further ado, to have you on the podcast. Okay, great to be here, Tristan. Now, the art of Neolithic Orkney. I mean, Antonia, sometimes when you think Neolithic Orkney, you think of those monumental stone constructions that still look so stunning today.

You think of those monumental stone constructions that still look so stunning today. But when you look closer, the more minuscule, the decoration, the art from this period in ancient history, it's equally, if not more stunning. Yeah, absolutely. And until recently, we wouldn't have really been able to talk very much about the art of Neolithic Orkney. But over the last, say, 20 years, there's just been this wealth of discoveries, particularly at sites like the Nessabrodga, where we've just found hundreds of decorated stones from the period. And these discoveries, Antonia, I should keep on that straight away. The last 20 years, has it mainly been through excavation or have advances in scientific development, scientific technologies, have they also helped us see these traces of Neolithic art too? It's a little bit of both really. We've had a lot of work done excavating Neolithic sites, particularly at the Nessa Brodga, and that has revealed a lot of decorated stones. And that

in itself has then made us go back to some of the other sites that we've known about for a long time and that were perhaps excavated a long time ago, and look at those with fresh eyes and kind of resurvey those, look at those again, and also make use of new recording techniques as well. Brilliant. Well, we'll definitely have a look at the Nessa Brogtiger as this podcast goes on. But let's set the background first of all. No such thing as a silly question. I think we've talked about this already in the past, Anton. But when exactly is the Neolithic in Orkney? Well, we're talking about a period from around the mid-4th millennium BC. So what we do know is that around about 3600 BC, we start to see these incredible stone-built stalled cairns appearing in Orkney.

Now, everything before then is a little bit hazy. We do know that there was a Mes appearing in Orkney. Now everything before then is a little bit hazy. We do know that there was a Mesolithic in Orkney, there were hunter-gatherers and we know they were there but there's a little bit of time between the end of the Mesolithic and the start of these stone cairns appearing in Orkney that we're not quite sure about. And then we normally think about the Neolithic running from the mid-fourth millennium in Orkney to around about kind of going into about 2000 BC, something like that. Brilliant. Well, quite a long time span then. Do we therefore have any idea what sparks this great change? How and why the Neolithic on Orkney begins? No, not really. And it is it's fascinating because it's so world famous.

And of course, these incredible structures really dominate our understanding of the Neolithic. And what we have in Orkney, what we're very, very lucky to have is stone houses as well as stone tombs from the same period. Fair enough indeed. And because it's such a large period, are there any ways that you archaeologists divide up the Neolithic and Orkney? Yes, and traditionally it's been divided up because of typology, which I mean nowadays this tends to fall apart when we look at the evidence in more detail. But traditionally the Neolithic and Orkney was split into the early Neolithic and the later Neolithic.

And the earlier Neolithic from the mid-fourth millennium BC to around about 3000 BC, and then the later Neolithic for a few hundred years after that to around about 2400 BC or 2200 BC or 2000 BC. There's different kind of dates. It tends to get a bit blurred when you kind of break down these kind of boundaries but what we used to think is that the earlier Neolithic was typified by these stalled cairns these funerary monuments with upright orthostats dividing the space between them and the house architecture very similar from the time and in the later Neolithic we start to get kind of more clustered settlements and kind of buildings that are sort of more square in plan inside.

And we get the passage graves like May's Howe. But as we've got more radiocarbon dates, we've started to realise that actually the picture is a little messier than that. And actually some of the tombs that we thought were kind of later or earlier, actually the dates don't always match up, which is quite interesting. Well, let's delve into this therefore, and I like, you know, the fact that there is sometimes a bit of confusion around it, and so hopefully we're going to keep going on that as the podcast progresses all about art. And if we focus in on the earlier Neolithic first, Antonia,

what sorts of art do we have surviving from this earlier period in Orkney's Neolithic, from the time of these stalled cairns and these stalled houses? Well again until recently we didn't have any examples of what you might think of Neolithic art as in carved stones, pecked, incised carved stones in buildings from these earlier sites and we still don't have any from the stalled cairns which is very interesting so it seems to be a very different sort of thing going on there. But in terms of the early houses, we do have two examples now of earlier Neolithic houses, or they're definitely in that style from Green or Aedae and also Smirquoie, which is near Kirkwall.

And they produced pecked stones with a kind of characteristic Neolithic art on. The stone from Smirkoi's got a horn spiral on it and also the stone from Green in Aedae that's got pecked motifs on it as well. So there is a possibility that there are decorated stones from this earlier period but we just haven't found huge numbers of them yet. So just so, just so for clarification, what exactly are pecked stones? So the stone in Orkney is flagstone. It is very easy to carve and very easy to peck and dress and pecking is generally done with a hammer stone and it's a kind of through percussion of hitting rock surface with a stone and it just leaves a kind of pecked impression on the stone. But Antonio this sounds really exciting for the future then for archaeologists such as yourself

when more and more of these earlier Neolithic sites are uncovered when more work is done on them the potential therefore for more art to be uncovered on these stones it seems very much from the evidence that you've discovered already that the potential is very much there. Yes and one of the interesting things that we might want to think about is that we always look at the stone but we also need to think about what other materials would have been around at the time and how they might have been decorated. I've mentioned that we're very lucky that Orkney has stone built houses from the Neolithic. It's very unusual in that respect. Most parts of Britain would have had wooden houses at that time and we

don't know how the wood would have been carved or decorated. And we have some sites like Scarabray which have produced carved bone artefacts and of course we have pottery from different sites as well and they have the same sort of decoration and motifs as the stone we find surviving on stone buildings in Orkney. So it may have been a very heavily decorated world where all sorts of objects were decorated, but because we only have the stone surviving to us by and large, we don't get the full picture. Well, you mentioned pottery there, so before we go on to the later Neolithic talk to me about this type of pottery that seems to define this early Neolithic period. Antonia what is this Unstanware pottery? Yes so Unstanware pottery is the name given to these decorated round bottomed bowls and these are ones which we associate with the early Neolithic period

we associate them with stalled cairns. And indeed, it's Unstan, the stalled cairn of Unstan, which gives its name to these vessels. So because they've got a round bottom, they would have to kind of sit in a scoop in the floor. They wouldn't kind of sit upon their own. They are decorated. The Unstanware vessels are really nicely decorated, often with this herringbone pattern, which interestingly mirrors a lot of the stonework on the tombs themselves. Unstan Cairn itself, the stonework in the lower courses outside was laid in a herringbone fashion,

leading some archaeologists to suggest that actually the tomb was a representation of an upturned bowl. So that raises lots of fascinating ideas about kind of life and death and the inversion of the world that happens in death and how these decorations cross these different spheres. Because it was quite interesting, so you're saying that if we hadn't found on any of these early tombs art, but the fact that the whole structure of the tomb might be a reflection of art, that's so interesting. It seems like there is the potential for these theories at the moment, Antonia, to see how the art is reflected on, you know, these early houses of the dead compared with the houses of the living. Yeah, absolutely. And again, it highlights how this decoration may have come out in many different ways, whether in the stonework or

carvings on them or also in artefacts like pottery. And does it almost seem like in this early Neolithic, you mentioned herringbone, I mean is the design of this art, does it seem to be almost if not completely geometric? Yes and that's something that we really do see in Orkney. I mean for a lot of people when you mention Neolithic art what first comes to mind is the great kind of spiral peck stones that we see in the Boyne Valley of Ireland, for example. But there's very few examples that compare to that in Orkney. There are some examples from passage graves, such as Pierwall in Westry and other sites, but generally the carvings in Neolithic Orkney are linear, they're angular, they consist of straight lines forming chevrons

and saltires and triangles and things like that. Abstract, we haven't really got any examples that you might you could categorically say are representational or at least not in the architectural art. We do have some figurines of course which is a perhaps another area to investigate. Well I mean mean absolutely well let's therefore go towards those figurines in that area of the neolithic now because i think you've kind of hinted at it already there for antonio but as the neolithic progresses in orkney do we therefore see an evolution more diversity in the art of these neolithic communities we start to see a quantity it appears everywhere everywhere and again having

that wealth of different types of architecture, we have tombs, we have houses and then we have some sites which have characteristics you might expect in funerary architecture and things that you associate more with domestic settings. So again the Nessa Brodger is a good example of that, it goes beyond those usual categories of a tomb or a house and we start to see on sites like that that actually there's a huge amount of carvings on lots of surfaces at sites like Scarabray we see little carvings all over and this is very much a domestic site so we can see that the mark making the need to kind of decorate or however we might talk about it is embedded in daily life at that village right well you mentioned scarabray so let's go on to

that and you mentioned village but scarabray to really kind of set the setting what is scarabray antonia so scarabray is a very very exquisitely well-preserved village, stone-built village, that is in the west mainland of Orkney. It was discovered when a storm stripped off some sand from these dunes by the coast and revealed these very, very well-preserved houses, complete with stone furniture inside and lots and lots of artefacts. Really incredible preservation. And whereabouts in this Neolithic village, one of, if not the best preserved in Western Europe, whereabouts has art been discovered? So the houses at Skara Brae are kind of clustered together.

And this is very characteristic of later Neolithic domestic settlements. And they're joined by passages. So there's little covered passages, would have been roofed passages in between these houses. And because of the nature of the site and the way it was discovered through a storm, these houses were actually left open for a long time after 1850 and did get a bit weathered. Gordon Child, a very famous archaeologist, excavated the site in the late 1920s and he also excavated house 7 which hadn't been exposed the elements before and the majority of the carvings are actually in house 7 and also in the bits of the passages which had remained covered

and so this suggests that there is a taphonomic element to this, that the carvings that have survived in there, the distribution is because they have been better preserved because they stayed covered. So from this we can assume that actually these carvings would have been all over the village, in all the passages, in all the houses and actually would have been very much an integral part of the stonework of this place. So was this art very much designed, if it's in the houses, if it's in the corridors, was it very much meant to be seen by the people who were living here? Well, that's the interesting thing, because many of the carvings are actually low down,

in corners, or very low to the ground, where they certainly wouldn't have been seen by everybody. But it does speak to the domestic where they certainly wouldn't have been seen by everybody but it does speak to the domestic scale of the building where perhaps people would have been sat at a lower level and it's where they would have made these marks. One of the things I've been exploring in my research is whether these things were always meant to be seen or whether the act of carving them was was more significant or at least as significant as whether they were meant to be sort of visually appreciated if you like. I mean that's a great point right there because we look at the say like the standing stones and I know there's a big discussion about whether the making of the stone

circle the quarrying of these monoliths was more important than the actual finished purpose of the stone circle so do you think that there could well be with art a communal aspect to the creation of this art, to decorating these stones and putting them in places like Scarabray? As you say, could that be almost as important as to where they were finally placed? I think so. And one of the things we should think about, though, is when we talk about art, we tend to see it as this catch-all term that explains everything. But if we even look at our own sort of society and how we live, there's a huge number of different types of symbols, of marks that we

make, of ways of communicating and different forms of art and, you know, that we use all the time. And they don't all mean the same thing. They don't have the same purpose and so you might think that so a kind of casual doodle or carving somewhere like Scarabray is probably quite different from a big very impressive spiral peck stone that you find in a passage grave. So there's different things operating at different levels here I think. Well let's focus in, you mentioned House 7 then, so let's focus in on House 7 and the art that's been discovered there. What sorts of artistic designs were uncovered at Scarab Ray, particularly from House 7? Well, again, they're almost entirely linear and geometric in style.

House 7 is interesting because it seems to be predominantly chevron designs. Leading archaeologist Leckie Shepherd even called it the House of the Chevrons. She excavated Skara Brae in the 1970s and recorded a lot of these carvings as well. And it does kind of raise some questions about whether particular houses or families or social groups would have had designs that were particular to them or maybe that they just liked them more than others, I don't know. But it does kind of make you wonder whether we're seeing some connection between particular motifs and different social groups.

And there's possibilities we see that in the tombs as well. How interesting. We'll get onto the tombs in a bit. I mean, that's so fascinating to have a look at that. I mean, but alongside all of these designs, all of this rich art there, can we imagine Skara Brae? It seems to be this vibrant village, one of many on Neolithic Orkney. But talk to me about colour. Was it also a very colourful place too? Was it also a very colourful place too? Yes, and that's really exciting.

And that's been one of the most important discoveries, I think, that has come out of the last 20 years when we think about these things in the Neolithic. We had always had suggestions that it was a colourful world. At Scarabray, in the early excavations, a stone pot was found, or well, several stone pots were found with traces of pigment inside them, which suggested they'd been used as paint pots. And one of them was actually found with a big chunk of ochre in it. And ochre is a red mineral that can be used as a pigment. We've also found bits of hematite, again, another iron ore, which can be used to make a red kind of pigment and so we think that people would have probably decorated their bodies their skin and probably also the walls in scarab ray what we do have from the

nesabrogga is evidence of painted stones in situ in the walls and so this supports the evidence we already had from scarab ray and suggests that actually what we see now is very much a pale representation of what life would have been in the Neolithic. And actually, it would have been very heavily decorated, really colourful. And you can get blacks from charcoal, of course, and soot. You can get these reds and yellows and oranges and browns from iron ores. So we would have had a very colourful world. and just from what you were saying there so the archaeology uncovered a pot with the ochre still in it so you could actually see the colour from 5 000 years ago still there in front of you yes that's right and it's on display

at Stromnus Museum so if anybody any of your listeners come there they'll be able to see it I'm sure they will I'm sure they will indeed. Now you mentioned that you regretted the Nassau Brogdo in a bit but you did also mention there tombs and Neolithic art and tombs too so let's go to these houses of the dead next and in particular seems to be one of the most elaborate and beautifully constructed Neolithic tombs in the whole world. You know where I'm going with this Antonia. What is Mace Howell? Well I think you've just said it it is one of the most beautiful pieces of architecture from Neolithic Europe it's a great passage grave it's absolutely vast it's exquisite in its stonework and it's probably it is the one of the best constructed buildings we

have from the time it has a very long, it enters into a chamber with four side cells and we think it's a tomb. So there wasn't bodies found when it was excavated but we know it had been extensively broken into before its 19th century excavation because there's evidence from the Vikings, their very famous runic carvings there on the walls. Okay, and alongside these Viking runic carvings, which are definitely a story for another podcast, I'll have to get you on the God Medieval podcast, talk to Cattel about that, Antonia, but alongside these Viking artistic runes and designs, you also have some Neolithic art in here too. Yes, and it's very interesting because in the 19th century the runic inscriptions were recorded and drawn and in amongst the more easily decipherable carvings were what were

described at the time as just doodles or scratches and it was only in the 1980s when Patrick Ashmore from Historic Scotland looked at these again, he said, hang on a minute, at least one of these looks not like a Viking doodle at all, but it actually looks like some of the carvings we found at Scarab Ray. And this necessitated a kind of revision of what had always been dismissed as a Viking carving and actually turned out to be a Neolithic carving. On the back of that, Richard Bradley and Colin Richards and others surveyed quite a number of passage graves in Orkney and they discovered a lot of other incised designs as well similar to that. So what we have in Orkney in these passage graves is not these big spiral decorated in your face pieces of display art like we get in the

Boyne Valley of Ireland but with much subtler form of expression much kind of more lightly in size much more difficult to see markings. All this month on Gone Medieval from History Hit, I'll be asking, who really were the Vikings? How did they become so successful in spreading across Northern Europe and beyond from the late 8th to the 11th centuries? What are the stories we tell about them? And what legacy do they leave behind for us today? I'm Dr Kat Jarman, and throughout September, I'll be examining the big questions about the Vikings

with a host of experts, and answering all of your burning questions about the Viking Age as well. So, for everything you always wanted to know about the Vikings, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I mean, so what sorts of markings? Are there any unique motifs that have been found in this particular tomb? Well, like with the houses at Skara Brae, there are a kind of sense that there are kind of a particular style

that suits a particular place. But really, we see the full repertoire of these designs, these angular motifs, quite often salt tires chevrons banded designs as well where there's designs between parallel vertical lines we do see these across these sites so similar designs at the Nessabrogger and Mace Howe. And do we see so Mace Howe is a great example of one of these houses of the dead and Neolithic art within this chambered tomb do we have examples from other chambered tombs across Orkney from the same sort of period do we also find Neolithic art within this chambered tomb. Do we have examples from other chambered tombs across Orkney from the same sort of period? Do we also find Neolithic art examples there too?

We do, but it's very, by and large, it's quite ephemeral. Sites like Cooween and Whiteford have produced some sort of examples of what's often called scratch art, this very lightly incised carvings. Some of the best examples we've had come from destroyed sites sadly, so Pierwall Quarry in Westry, Aedemance and they produced these elaborate spiral decorated stones. But there's also a site on the home of Papa Westry which is a slightly larger island of Papa Westry in the north isles of Orkney and this is a very very large passage grave that has in situ pecked decoration so this is unique in Orkney and there the decoration is actually quite different the pecked decoration there's a lot of small cups and a lot of curvy linear lines over the cups

that give have been called the eyebrow motif because they actually look like eyes and eyebrows and that's quite interesting because it actually connects that site to one of the figurines found at a domestic site in Westry called the Links of Noltland which is very similar in style period and architecture to Scarab Ray so that does give rise to a possibility that of representational art. Interesting indeed. So is that almost on the way towards figurative art? We've talked about Kilmartin Glenn in another podcast and looking at actually rock art there and figurative representations of axe heads

and then a red deer stag as well. Are there hints of that potentially in Neolithic Orkney too? Yes, there are. And I think this eyebrow motif, this is really where we've got our evidence for figurative art and the wonderful figurines that have been turning up. We do have a whalebone figurine from Scarab Ray it's known as the Scarab Ray Buddo and it was rediscovered it had actually been found in the very old excavations and then it was rediscovered but we also have from the links of nautland these figurines uh including the westry venus or the as it's as it's come known as and that's very

definitely got the eye and the eyebrows that you also see in the tomb and also which will link to which we're going to be going on to next now i promise but we've done something recently on the chalk drum discoveries which are in the world of Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum. And one of the designs you see on that are once again, you see those eyebrows and those, does that really emphasise how Orkney, it was very much linked to a larger, much wider Neolithic world that included amongst its places what is today Yorkshire?

Absolutely. And the fact that we see these designs in these different places and the Folkton drums and also the recently discovered Burton Agnes drum are very much evidence of that. The designs both the curvilinear eyebrow motif that you know and but also the spirals and the kind of lozenges you find on those drums are very similar to the type of motifs we find in Orkney. With one of those places being, of course, the Ness of Brodga. So let's go to that now, Antonia. But first of all, what is the Ness of Brodga? Explain to us what we think this site was used for in Neolithic times. Wow, that's a very good question. The Ness of Brodga is absolutely huge.

It's best described as a kind of this massive neolithic complex of buildings many of which are just absolutely huge I mean they're on a scale of there's not actually that many buildings in Orkney now of this size you know some of them are like 20 meters long and it's very they're very very impressive and they're big stone-built buildings they include elements that we might associate with a funerary architecture some of them look a little bit like tombs but also they have hearths they associate elements that we normally find with domestic architecture but on a scale never really seen before they also incorporate standing stones. Structure 10 of the Nessabrogha has standing

stones incorporated in it and some of the stones used in the site are on a par with those you see at the Stones of Stennis. Huge, huge upright slabs but laying prone and used in the buildings. So it's an extraordinary site. What we do know is it's at the heart of the heart of Neolithic Orkney. It's connected to Maze Howe and the Stones of Stennis and the Ring of Brodgar. It's absolutely part of that Neolithic world, very, very important world. Artifacts on the site have come from this huge geographical spread. There's things like Arran P stone there's a material from a wide area so clearly people knew about it it was important it was high status. Important and high status and is this all information that we're we're still learning more about because this excavation that's occurring

there it seems to be one of the most important in the whole well one of the most well known in the whole of the British Isles. Yes, it's an incredible site. And Nick Card and his team have been excavating there for, well, kind of in 2003 was when the site was rediscovered. So it's kind of nearly 20 years now of work being going on on the site. And the discoveries, they really are world beating. It is one of the most important sites in the world, for sure. And talking about discoveries, when talking about neolithic art correct me if i'm wrong but decorated stones

have been uncovered from this site from even before excavations began yeah it's it's a really nice thing that actually the story of the site starts way before these recent excavations so in 1925 the farmer miss field it it was, was ploughing and turned up this stone which had this elaborate decoration along one edge, a bit like the bands of a Fair Isle jumper or something, this banded decoration which was carved in between so parallel lines in eight little bands with chevrons and zigzags and crosses and lozenges in between them. So a really beautiful stone.

And at the time, it was thought to be part of a Bronze Age kist because it was an upright slab. And because the decoration at that time was thought to be most similar to Bronze Age decoration. And it's been in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh on display almost from that time. But nothing else was really known about on that site and it was only in 2003 when the then farmer of that land then ploughed up another stone a notched stone so not one with obvious decoration but a worked stone that then it was realised that the connection between things and that's when excavations really start to happen soon after that

and yeah excavations happening soon after that and as you've hinted at so much has been unearthed from this site including lots of decorated stones. Yes I think we're on over a thousand now which is just quite staggering actually to think about and what I've recorded I mean that is a huge number. But within that, there's a particular style associated with that building. These banded designs seem to be associated with this one building on the site. And then other buildings on the site seem to also have their own style. So this is very interesting and goes back to what I was saying about Scarab Ray, where perhaps different buildings with different functions or different social groups, different families, perhaps associated with different motifs. Right, how interesting, so interesting. So what sorts of motifs do we therefore find? Well at the Nessa Brodger the range of Neolithic art is even broader

than that which I've already discussed with the tombs and with Scarab Ray and it's at the Nessa Brodger where we find not only the linear angular incised carvings on flagstone but we also get the kind of much coarser grain sandstone which is pecked chiseled we've got chiseled examples from there and we've even got examples of bas relief sculpture from the Nessa Broga and that's very very unusual. Amongst all of these different designs you know whether they're incised whether they're in dress and I guess it also does it very much depends on the type of stone that's being worked are there any also really interesting designs that we found in the Ness of Brogda that maybe we don't seem to find anywhere else on the Orkney? Yes I mean whereas a lot of the designs

we do see in other places and we've and not only in Orkney but also outside of Orkney you've mentioned exquisite examples from Yorkshire. But there's some markings and particularly the Brodga butterfly as it's come to be called which seems to be unique to the Ness of Brodga. And this design is formed from a cross, so a sort of saltire cross and then with arcing sort of arcs either side of it. So it's what of a it's what we'd call an opposed fan motif I suppose something like that and whereas

we do find these opposed triangles and similar designs in other sites as well in that particular form it seems to be unique to the Nessebrogge or at least at the moment. And do we think that if we have some of these unique types of designs and I think on the Yorkshire drum you do have well on the the Burson And do we think, therefore, if we have some of these unique types of designs, and I think on the Berth and Agnes drum you do have potential similarities to the butterfly style there. We saw the butterfly stone in the World of Stonehenge exhibition, absolutely fascinating. Do we think, therefore, that lots of these artistic designs, they originate from this part of the world and then they are caught on by other people who venture here and these ideas spread across this area of the Neolithic world. Well that's

very hard to say and we'd certainly need to tighten up our chronology and get a lot more dates before we'd say anything like that but I mean what we can say is that there's this a certain style, there's this repertoire of motifs which we see across the Neolithic world from Brittany to Ireland, Orkney, Wessex, Yorkshire all these other places and we see them all over and these kind of different elaboration different kind of variations on these across these different places and some of them seem to have been more popular or taken on board more in some places than others but in terms of whether they started here in Orkney and then moved elsewhere it's difficult to say. So in regards to

the multitude and variation of decorated stone examples that you and Nick and the whole team have already uncovered and analysed from the Nessabrogta excavations. What do you think this tells us about the importance of decorating stones in a place like the Nesabrogda for these Neolithic communities 5,000 years ago? Well, it must have been an absolutely intrinsic part of just what they did. I think it was kind of so much a part of their world and their life and how they did. And another piece of evidence we have from the Nessa Brodger is because we're excavating the site under modern conditions, we're carefully recording everything that we come across or deconstruct, we've actually found that a lot

of the buildings, a lot of the structures had carvings placed into the walls deliberately. And what we're seeing is not just reuse, although that does happen as well, what we're seeing is not just reuse although that does happen as well but we're seeing evidence that they were carving stones as they were building these walls placing them carefully in the structures and this could be understood as a similar sort of practice to something we see across the world in lots of different times. People build kind of apotropaic things into structures, things to kind of protect the building or to ward off evil, if you like. And we see that right into the modern period. You might think of, you know, the shoes or cats that are built into walls in a, you know, post-medieval context. But the fact that at the Nessa Brodger we have evidence that they're doing this, putting carvings into the wall, kind of speaks to us that actually these are really important.

That whatever these carvings are communicating or however they're meaningful is actually intrinsic to the building process and these buildings themselves. Interesting. And I'm guessing sometimes, therefore, with those particular examples of art, that they weren't supposedly meant to be seen, we don't think. No, and that's very interesting because that kind of turns on its head everything we think we or we assume about what art does and what it means. So it does kind of suggest there's other things going on as well. And it goes back to this idea that I said before about how perhaps the process of making the carvings and the whole sort of social practice around them was as important as what they looked like or how they were then seen. One or two more things before we completely wrap up,

but I need to ask about these particular artefacts from Nessabrogda and I think also from Scarabray too. We saw a few examples at the National Museum of Scotland collections not too long ago and they blew my mind, absolutely did. And these are these mysterious carved balls. Now, Antonia, just give us an idea of what we're talking about with these carved balls. Now, Antonia, just give us an idea of what we're talking about with these carved balls. Well, carved stone balls are these sort of artefacts. They're about the size of a tennis ball, I suppose, you know, fit in the hand very well. And they're particularly associated with northern Scotland or northeast Scotland in the Neolithic.

The vast majority of them have been found not in context. So they're a bit of a mystery. But you get ones they're elaborately carved so carving in the round so this kind of three-dimensional sculpture which in itself kind of highlights a high degree of skill and expertise to plan these out often they're kind of knobbly they kind of often called knobbed balls they have different kind of bits on them and often very elaborately carved as well and there's some exquisite examples there's one from a place called Towie which an Aberdeen show which has elaborate kind of spiral carvings on and very similar motifs to that which we find in the passage grave art and I'm guessing you said the purpose of these richly decorated carved balls and if you have a

look at them on google or wherever they are they absolutely blow your mind the purpose of them i'm going to throw it out to you have you got any idea whatsoever oh no and that is a great question and i think the thing is they have fascinated people for such a long time but we're still no closer to knowing what they're for and there's been a lot of wonderful suggestions which are really interesting and some people have suggested that they're kind of mnemonic devices and they're actually a sort of 3d map or a 3d story that through holding them in your hand and moving them around and perhaps using your fingers to trace the lines and trace the shape of them that they actually are a way of storytelling through an object. They don't generally show much signs of wear, you know, in terms of being used as a weapon or as used as a stone tool or anything like that. They certainly seem to have some ceremonial purpose.

And of course, we're always slightly wary of saying that as archaeologists, because it seems to be, you know, it's like a catch-all term for something we don't understand but I mean certainly they do seem to have a kind of special role to play. Oh there we go hopefully you'll be able to find more about them in the future. It sounds really exciting indeed for the whole story of Arsene theolithic orcany at the time Antonia and I'm guessing it sounds like maybe going too much into thinking and theorizing but can you imagine that you know some 5 000 years ago there perhaps were these people who were dedicated artists you know who were highly renowned artists who would have been known for creating all these various types of motifs that you see now on site such as scarabray and nessa brogda and mace howell yeah i think i

think there would have been and i think what we're talking about is incredibly skilled people. I mean, these buildings that we see in Neolithic Orkney are built with incredible skill, engineering skill, a knowledge of how materials work, where to get materials from, how to break stone, how to build with stone, how to carve it, how to do all these things. And then when you look at the artefacts, again, great deal of skill in

the decoration in the making and so these really were people who were incredibly expert at their craft incredibly expert indeed and as you've been highlighting there Orkney in the Neolithic but also the Bronze Age and the Iron Age remains they are absolutely astonishing to go and see so people please do go and go and see it on your holidays if you can in the future because they are absolutely incredible. Antonia this has been an absolute blast last but certainly not least you've written a book all about this Neolithic Orkney art which is called? Art and Architecture in Neolithic Orkney. Well there you go and Antonia it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today that's okay thank you tristan well there you go there was dr antonia thomas talking all about the art of neolithic orkney the first in a intermittent prehistoric scotland series that

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