The Ancients - Orkney: Centre of the Stone Age

Episode Date: January 15, 2023

Orkney, a group of islands off Britain’s north coast, famed for their stunning, rural scenery. But 5,000 years ago, during the Neolithic Period - or ‘New Stone Age’ - it was a completely different story.Back then, these islands were rich in stunning art and architecture. A great centre of the Stone Age World, with connections that stretched across Britain, Ireland and beyond.In this very special episode - the first in a new miniseries about Prehistoric Scotland - we explore the extraordinary Stone Age story of Orkney. We’ll start first with an overview of its Neolithic remains, before we focus in on an incredible excavation that has revealed so much about Orkney’s Stone Age importance. How this was a great centre of a Neolithic world that stretched across the British Isles and beyond...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. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. Orkney, a group of islands off Britain's north coast, famed for their stunning scenery. Today, it's easy to see this as a place very much on the periphery,

far away from bustling centres such as Edinburgh, Glasgow and London. But 5,000 years ago, during the Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, well it was a completely different story. Back then, these islands were rich in stunning art and architecture. A great centre of the Stone Age world, with connections that stretched across Britain, Ireland and beyond. When you look at the map of Britain and see Orkney at that kind of pivotal position right at the tip of Scotland with access to the east and west coast. I think it was very important then.

And it is almost like turning the map of Britain on its head. It's too easy to assume, oh, well, the Neolithic must have been a bit grey. Nope, they had colour. There's the old saying, if you scratch the surface of Orkney, it bleeds archaeology. The studies we've done so far are, they're about 50-50 milk

and meat. So that was their diet, though there is a problem. Now in this very special episode, the first in a new mini-series about prehistoric Scotland, we'll be highlighting the extraordinary Stone Age story of Orkney. We'll start first with an overview of its Neolithic

remains, before we focus in on an incredible excavation that has revealed so much about Orkney's Stone Age importance. How this was a great centre of a Neolithic world that stretched across the British Isles and beyond. So what was the Neolithic period? This seems a good question to kick this all off with. Well, short answer, it was one of the most important ages in the whole of our prehistory, occurring in Britain some 5,000 years ago. The Neolithic witnessed the greatest behavioural change in the modern human story. When populations gradually put aside their more

mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle and adopted a more sedentary one, centred around farming, around agriculture. This shift seems to have started in Orkney, an area of the British Isles renowned for its rich, fertile agricultural land, during the early 4th millennium BC, more than 5,000 years ago. early 4th millennium BC, more than 5,000 years ago, because it's around that time that we start to see the construction of great stone buildings. For instance, the building of monumental stalled cairns, stone tombs characterised by big upright slabs that divided up the space within these early burial chambers, hence stalled cairns. You can see multiple

examples of these in Orkney today, a lot of them on the island of Rousey, for instance, Midhow Stalled Cairn, but there are also a few hybrid stalled cairns on the mainland, such as at Unstan and the Tomb of the Eagles. But alongside these iconic stalled cairns, archaeologists have also uncovered Neolithic houses dating to this time, such as the two roughly 5,500-year-old structures found at the Nap of Halwa on Papa Westry, two of the oldest standing buildings in Northwest Europe. There's a cool fact for you right there. So what happened before this?

Well, prior to the 4th millennium BC on Orkney, archaeologists have only found limited evidence of human activity in this area of the world during the preceding Mesolithic. Now they have found some artifacts, they have found evidence of human activity, let me stress that. We do know that people were living here. But given the temporary nature of these hunter-gatherer sites, searching for pre-Neolithic archaeology is like looking for a needle in a haystack. It's with the dawn of the Neolithic period in Orkney, with the construction of these monumental buildings, that everything started to change. The beginning of a great golden age in Orkney's prehistoric story.

The Neolithic period in Orkney roughly lasted from the beginning of the fourth millennium, let's say around 3800 BC, so more than 5,000 years ago, and it lasted until just over a thousand years later with the beginning, the dawn of the Bronze Age or the Chalcolithic period in roughly 2400- 2300 BC. Now archaeologists have overarchingly divided this Stone Age period in Orkney into two categories. First you have the early Neolithic period, really roughly the first half of this Stone Age in Orkney covering the fourth millennium BC, let's say between 3800 and 3000 BC. It's a period defined by stalled cairn tomb architecture and a particular type of beautifully decorated pottery called

unstonware. Now second you have the later Neolithic period covering the latter half of Orkney's Neolithic during the third millennium BC dating roughly between let's say 3000 BC and around about 2400 BC. And this later period is defined by much grander and more elaborate chamber tombs such as Mace Howell and a new, widely circulated type of pottery called grooved ware. More on that a little later. Now you can find incredible prehistoric sites on many of the islands across Orkney that make up Orkney today but arguably some of Orkney's most incredible stone age structures are on the mainland. I've mentioned Mace Howe already so let's start with this immaculate structure. It is the largest and the most elaborate chambered tomb in the whole of Orkney and certainly one of

the most finely built in Western Europe, ranking alongside the incredible Newgrange Tomb in Ireland. I know I say incredible a lot, but let's be honest, these sites are pretty incredible. Surrounding Macehall was a great ditch and stone wall, sealing it off from the outside world. great ditch and stone wall sealing it off from the outside world. The earthen mound above the tomb is today some 10 meters in height with a diameter of some 25 meters. It's massive. When you go there when you see Mace Howe in person you really get a sense of its size and its scale. This would have been a very visible monument in the stone Age landscape of mainland Orkney, clearly visible to the surrounding communities that we know were living here some 5,000 years ago. It is one of the great wonders of the Neolithic world,

and I encourage you all on any visits to Orkney to definitely go and see Mace Howe. You get a sense of its size and scale from the outside, but it's on the inside where things are even more incredible. To enter the tomb, you have to crouch and make your way through roughly a 10-metre long passageway that's covered on either side by large stone slabs. Finally, you emerge into a great central chamber. Its walls are made out of dry stone, basically stone walls made without mortar. And there are three hollowed out squares in the walls leading off to smaller chambers, side chambers called cells. If you look closely enough at the dry stone walls as you're admiring this incredible architecture by these 5,000 year old stone age builders. They used a technique called corbelling to create a roof where these large slabs of stone edged their way

inwards slightly until they formed a roof. It's a really incredible feat of ancient engineering. When you look closer at the walls you also notice you might be able to make out viking runes etched onto this stone age tomb by north visitors much much later now in each of the four corners of the central chamber you'll also notice an upright standing stone or monolith initially it was believed that these great monoliths served as buttresses to help support the dry stone structure but no longer. It's now thought that these great standing stones were purely inserted into the tomb for decoration, they were just for show. It's hard to imagine just how much time and effort, how much communal manpower was needed to erect this Neolithic tomb some 5,000 years years ago fit with huge slabs of stone such as these monoliths

just for decoration, this was probably a tomb for elite members of this Neolithic Orcadian society. What you really get a sense of is that these Stone Age farmers who constructed Mace Howe, well they were also incredible builders too. And it's by going to somewhere like Mace Howe that you they were also incredible builders too. And it's by going to somewhere like Mace Howe that you get a clear sense of that. Not far away from Mace Howe, across the Loch of Harry, you have another iconic megalithic monument from Stone Age Orkney. The largest stone circle in Scotland, this is the Ring of Brodka. Archaeologists believe that this stone circle was constructed near the end of the Neolithic period in Orkney, roughly around, let's say, 2600 BC.

It is a massive circle, originally consisting of 60 upright standing stones and separated from the outside world by a rock hut ditch with only two earthen causeways constructed across it. Once it was built, the circle likely served a communal purpose for the Stone Age community. It was probably a centre for certain Stone Age rituals. Now I visited the ring a few months back and I was talking to Professor Jane Downs, an archaeologist and expert on the Ring of Brodgar and she mentioned how although you're not allowed to do this today, in the past if you stood in the centre of the circle and you shouted out, you made a noise, well you would almost hear that noise coming back to you. The sound was reflected off the stones that were still standing

in the ring. So you can only imagine what it must have been like when all 60 of these stones were upright and created this massive ring, this massive circle, as these Stone Age people were standing in the centre, they were doing whatever ritual they were doing, perhaps they were chanting or something similar, they were making sounds and that sound was being amplified by this ring of monoliths that surrounded them reflected off of these stones and creating what must have been a really striking noise reflected off of these standing stones as i mentioned at the start and as professor jane downs also stressed you can't do this today. Do not stand in the centre of the Ring of Broglie today. That is forbidden. But you can still go around it and it is an incredible

sight to see in person. As mentioned, the largest stone circle in Scotland. But what's just as, if not arguably more interesting than the Ring's final purpose, its association with communal rituals, communal activity. Well it's the whole process of how these stone age farmers went about constructing this ring almost 5,000 years ago. How did they get these massive stones to this particular place and from where? Because if you go to the ring of Brodgar today and you examine the stones you quickly start to notice that there is quite a lot of differences between the individual stones in their size, in their shape and in their texture because these monoliths did not all come from the same source, from the same

quarry. The Neolithic Orcadians who built this monument, the Ring of Brodgar, sourced their monoliths from several different quarries across Orkney, one of which was a hillside called Vestra Fjord, which lies several miles away to the northwest. These Stone Age Orcadians would first have to extract a large standing stone from a rock outcrop from this hillside using tools such as hammer stones and once they had finished that massive task of extracting one of these monoliths one of these standing stones from the rock outcrop well they then had to carry it had to transport it to the Loch of Harry some several miles away from the hillside and there have been many theories as to how they did it. Did they transport this standing stone down to the seaside and then ferry the standing stone around the Orkney

mainland and up into the Loch of Harry, into the Loch of Stannis, and then erect the standing stone at the Ring of Brodgar that way? Did they move these standing stones on seaweed, on rollers? The debate continues. Theories abound, and we're not going to delve into them here because we've got too much to talk about. But it's a really interesting part of the story, just how rings, stone circles like the Ring of Brodka, were constructed almost 5,000 years ago. Now the Stone Age quarry at Vestre Fjord is situated in the west of the Orkney mainland, just north of the best preserved Neolithic settlement in Western Europe. Yes, you heard me right. Because alongside being home to

Scotland's largest stone circle, the two oldest buildings still standing in Northwest Europe, and arguably also home to the most elaborate Stone Age tomb from this area of the world, well Orkney is also home to the best preserved Neolithic village in Western Europe. It's called Skara Brae. For many centuries, this Stone Age settlement was hidden from view beneath earthen-crusted sand dunes overlooking the beautifully picturesque Scale Bay. But in 1850, a vicious storm peeled away these dunes' earthen tops to reveal Scarborough's stone remains. Today you can go and see the remains of this Neolithic

part of it anyhow. The rest of Scarborough is underneath the surrounding fields but you can see very clearly several houses closely connected by weaving passageways. You can see iconic Stone Age architecture visible within. And you can also see the stone rectangular outlines of some 5,000-year-old beds, square box-like containers called tanks, and enigmatic stone shelf-like furniture that archaeologists have called dresses. Shells for the house occupants' that archaeologists have called dresses. Shells for the house occupants' Stone Age belongings, perhaps. And beneath Skara Brae today is something equally astounding,

something that I find really, really cool. And that is a highly sophisticated sewer system. 5,000-year-old drainage that flowed out into the nearby bay. The Orcadian farmers that lived in villages like Skara Brae were incredibly sophisticated, living in a settlement that was filled with colour, decoration and finely carved ornaments that archaeologists have unearthed here over the past century. From ochre paint pots still with the rich red hematite colour visible within, to bone jewellery and polished stone accents. And then there are the mysterious, intricately carved bulls they found at Skara Brae.

Coming in various designs, archaeologists still speculate about the purpose of these incredible to look at stone spheres, from mace heads to children's toys. Now I put this question of what these stone age bull balls, these incredible carved balls were used for to my, I'll be honest, very meager TikTok following. What were they used for? And their answers didn't disappoint. From ancient hand grenades to that thing that you put in the washing machine to make sure that your clothes don't all bundle up together. Basically, going back to the serious stuff, there are few places in the world that can rival the incredible wealth and variety of Stone Age art and architecture surviving on Orkney.

5,000 years ago, this was an incredibly important area of a vibrant, interconnected Stone Age world that stretched far beyond Britain's shores. Every year, archaeologists and scientists are learning more about this land's prehistoric past. And of all of these endeavours, from surveys to DNA analysis, there is one excavation right at the heart of Neolithic Orkney that deserves special mention. One of the most significant excavations currently ongoing in the British Isles. I am, of course, talking about the Ness of Brodgar

excavation, situated on the Brodgar headland in between the Loch of Harry and the Loch of Stenness, close by other famous Orcadian Stone Age monuments such as the Ring of Brodgar, Mace Howell and the remains of the gigantic standing stones that make up the Stones of Stenness. As visible from the great cluster of Neolithic archaeology found in this area of the Orkney mainland, you have to imagine this area of Orkney bustling with human activity some 5,000 years ago. And right at the centre of all of this activity was the Ness of Brodgar, a great communal centre where Stone Age people gathered from places all across Orkney, Britain and further afield. A great centre of the Stone Age world.

Now, a few months ago, I had the pleasure of visiting the excavation to learn more about it and the extraordinary archaeology that the dig here has unearthed so far. And to show me around and tell me more about it, I teamed up with Dr Nick Cart, the head of the excavation. What do we think the Ness of Brodgar was? Well, the Ness was in use for well over a thousand years, in fact over 1,200 years. So spanning the whole Neolithic period in Orkney. And through that thousand years, its meaning, its function would have changed. But if you wanted to try and encapsulate what it was in its kind of heyday,

I think it was a place of gathering, a place where people came from right the way across Orkney, but also from much further afield. And what do people do when they gather? They eat. They feasted here in very grand scale. And so we've got these incredible Neolithic sites all around, with the Ring of Brodgar up there,

the stones of Stanness down there. But how did the excavation here come about? Well in 1999 when the heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site was designated, the local archaeology society in conjunction with the archaeology institute decided to try and put these sites into kind of wider context. So we employed geophysics and we've now covered a huge area all the way from beyond the Ring of Bro, go right the way down the peninsula out towards Maze Howe, another large area out near Scarab Ray. But the first two fields that we did was the field we're standing in and the field near the bridge. And this was a kind of window into what to expect. We always

knew that there's the old saying, if you scratch the surface of Orkney, it bleeds archaeology. But the geophysics just showed this was true, because you scratch the surface of Orkney it bleeds archaeology but the geophysics just showed this was true because here on the tip of the peninsula we had just dozens of anomalies rectangular ones circular ones linear ones concentric ones you name it we had it and it was through that that the following year when this field was last plowed a large stone slab turned up which we investigated but instead of finding stone kist or a stone coffin, we found part of the top of one of these walls. And that's what really got the excavation started. Very small scale to begin with, just a series of test pits across it.

But as you see, it's gradually expanded outwards. And so when did it start dawning on you that this wasn't a Bronze Age, it wasn't an Iron Age site, that this was Neolithic? After the very first season, the series of test pits we had showed that it was only Neolithic material culture that was coming up. We've since discovered odd fragments of Bronze Age and there's later Iron Age activity in one of our other trenches. But on the whole, everything is Neolithic. So this whole mound, which is up to four and a half, five metres high, is all archaeology, is Neolithic. So this whole mound which is up to four and a half, five metres high is all archaeology, mainly Neolithic. Structures have been built one on top of the other over a millennium.

So it's a multi-layered, very much this is a multi-layered site is it? It's a multi-layered, multi-phase site and each one of the structures also has its own kind of phasing where these structures are built, reconstructed, remodelled, additions being made to them and no doubt that's reflecting changes in the function of each structure. And what we're looking at in front of us, so this is the result of more than 20 years of excavation now? Almost 20 years. As I said very small scale for the first few seasons and then from about 2008 the trenches have gradually got bigger. But even considering all the trenches we have open, it still represents less than 10% of the site.

The fact that the trenches only cover 10% of the site is testament to the great size of this Stone Age meeting place some 5,000 years ago. And the archaeology Nick and his team have done here has revealed so much about the Nessabrodka's layout. Well it seems to have almost been planned it's not like town planning but a lot of the structures particularly in the phase that we're investigating just now we have these very large peered structures all arranged around this kind of central paved area complete with a stump of a standing stone that they were laid out to respect

each other but they were also contained within a major walled enclosure which initially we thought enclosed the whole site but we now know it just consists of a major wall at the north end facing the Ring of Brodgar, another wall at the south end but the two bodies of water creating kind of natural boundaries for the other two sides of the site. Right so you've got like a wall blocking off one entrance and the other entrance but as you say with the water there you don't actually need a walls on the other side because that's doing the job for you. Exactly. And so within this surrounding wall what has the archaeology revealed about the interior of the Nessebrogda? How many buildings for instance do we know of so far?

So far I think we've actually numbered about 38 separate structures, but that number doesn't represent all the structures on site. The geophysics shows there's many more. You can see, for instance, this structure in front of us is a structure 21, again utilising this peered style of architecture of extending out of the trench, disappearing underneath a spoil key. So you're looking at probably in excess of 100 structures on site. So 5,000 years ago, how important do we think the Nessebrodger site was? I think it was a site that was probably renowned throughout Britain. We find material culture here

that came from, for instance, pitch stone, a type of volcanic glass, but like obsidian that's found only on the island of Arran off the southwest coast of Scotland. We find mace heads here from the western islands of Scotland. We find an axe blank from the great Neolithic axe factories in Langdale in the Lake District. Some of the pottery is most closely, resembles some of the pottery from southern Britain. The art is paralleled by art from the island.

So a whole range of different kind of influences coming in. So I think that this was a place, maybe a pilgrimage at one stage of its life. And I think we see people coming here from not just across Orkney, from much, much further afield. When you look at the map of Britain and see Orkney at that kind of pivotal position right at the tip of Scotland with access to the east and west coast. I think it was very important then and it is almost like turning the map of Britain on its head. It's fascinating to think that this site some 5,000 years ago was a great centre of the Stone Age world with people venturing here from all across Orkney, Britain and beyond. I quite often consider this like the present day county show we have in Orkney, where everybody comes together from across the islands, kind of not only kind of to display their prized bulls and

cattle, but also a place where people come together to exchange stories, find new wives, husbands. So it's very much a kind of social event. But I think with the nest being situated here in the middle of this kind of huge natural amphitheatre, with these kind of iconic monuments like the Ring of Brodgar, Stones of Stannis, Mace Howe, only a stone's throw away, that there was definitely ceremonial religious activities going on here as well. One thing I found really interesting from what you were saying there, definitely ceremonial religious activities going on here as well. One thing I found really interesting from what you were saying there, alongside this interconnected nature of that Neolithic world,

is this whole idea of community, these people coming together. It does seem that that was really important to these Neolithic Orcadians. That idea of community is important, but at the same time, I think what we're possibly looking at in the Nessebrugge is different communities constructing each one of these major structures and each one of these structures is different so some of them slightly bigger more grander more carefully built so you're almost seeing kind of competition between these groups also being exhibited in some of the structures here just in the same way we see some of the stones at the rings maybe being brought by different communities in a kind of competition. And it's through that type of competition that we see changes happening in society, the rise of kind of

hierarchical societies, demotic societies. A bit further on from the main trench, sloping down the hillside towards the Loch of Stenness, is another smaller trench. Nick and his team have called it Trench T and when we walked down there a whole host of archaeologists were busy working away in it, surrounded by ancient stone remains. Well this is Trench T and it includes really many firsts for the nest, not least is probably the biggest Neolithic rubbish heap, Midden Mount in Britain. It's massive, over 70 metres in diameter, and although it survives for almost five metres today, even in the 19th century,

there's illustrations and maps of this area that show it as a much, much more prominent feature in the landscape. So this was where these Neolithic people were dumping their rubbish, whatever that might have been? Most of it consists of a kind of peat ash or turf ash from the innumerable fires that must have been lit over in the main structures but they're bringing

it all over here and it's like they're making a monument almost out of all this rubbish. They're making a statement saying to the wider world look at us this is a reflection of the conspicuous consumption the feasting that was happening over in the buildings that we saw earlier. And sometimes we don't think about the rubbish mounds but as an archaeologist is this like an incredibly invaluable source for learning about these Neolithic people who lived here some 5,000 years ago? Well for an archaeologist a midden heap is a kind of treasure trove. There's so much information that can be gleaned from that, whether it's the food they

were eating, the fuels were using on their fires, by implication, the economy and environmental evidence as well. So it is really that kind of treasure trove of information. And alongside this rubbish mound, what's this other structure that we've got in front of us? Well underneath this massive midden mound is this structure, which even by nest standards is very unusual and it is unique. There is very unusual. And it is unique. There's nothing else quite like it known anywhere. And it's the architecture, the beauteous nature.

Despite the fact this building has been extensively robbed of stone, when it was first built, it must have just looked fantastic. We see many special elements to it, whether it's the beautiful external masonry sitting on a stepped foundation the corners which are not at right angle but slightly obtuse to give the overall building a kind of cushion shape but it's internally that we see something quite extraordinary the inside was lined with kind of prone orthostats almost repurposed standing stones laying on edge so those long thin slabs, is that what you're talking about?

Yeah, so they're round. We have one there, another two running up this side of the building. One has been robbed out on the far side, but the one running further up still is in situ. And these formed a kind of almost skirting board within this building. And behind them you wouldn't see exposed masonry, but in fact the inside was clad with upright stones. You can still see some of them, snapped off ones, right the way along here. Looking at the size of those stones, it must have taken an incredible amount of time and

effort to move them, to create, to build this structure, whether it's the exterior walls or its interior too. Well, it's one of the things about the nest is the amount of stone that's been quarried. It's not only been quarried, but it's also been transported here and then put up into these wonderful structures. But to actually extract one of these massive standing stones from a quarry and then move it here without actually breaking it is an amazing accomplishment in itself. But whether these as I said are repurposed, maybe part of a dismantled stone circle, we're not quite sure yet. This building in Trench T, complete with its own

standing stones lying on their edge, is unlike any building that the Nessa Brodka team have excavated at the site. So what was it used for? Well, it's one of the big questions that we'd hope to answer this year by getting down onto the floor deposits because this structure has gone through many phases of kind of robbing and destruction and we had hoped that a kind of clay surface that was starting to be revealed within this was a kind of floor but we're now thinking that is actually a ceiling deposit after the structure went out of use it was deliberately sealed so the floors we hope are still going to be intact underneath that ceiling deposit but we won't see

them this year unfortunately. And so have you found any artefacts from the interior so far? Nothing really within the interior there's kind of been the usual spreads of grooved wear pottery but just outside the building just outside the external wall face but just outside of the building, just outside the external wall face I think it was in 2018 or 2019 there was a beautiful mace head or half a mace head that turned up and what was most attractive about that was the type of stone it was made from which was rhodochrosite, a kind of derivative of manganese and the only known source for that that we know of

is halfway down the cliffs at St John's Head in Hoy. So maybe that element of danger inherent in its extraction added to this artefact's value. So if this object was from Hoy, I know it's pretty close today, but that feels it would have still been quite a journey some 5,000 years ago to voyage over there over choppy waters to get the material and then to bring it back here. voyage over there over choppy waters to get the material and then to bring it back here. Again we underestimate the kind of navigational and maritime skills of our Neolithic ancestors because when you think about it our Neolithic ancestors had to come here from mainland Scotland across Pentland Firth, one of the roughest bits of water anywhere, and they weren't just bringing

themselves, they were bringing the kind of cultural package but also the livestock, cattle, sheep, goats, and they also introduced red deer to the islands. So an amazing undertaking. And do we have any ideas so far as to when this structure dates to? We don't have any dates for it yet. We think that because it underlies this kind of huge midden mound, and it must be quite early, but then again, some of the architectural features in this are more akin to what we see in,

say, Structure 10 over in the main trench, something quite advanced in terms of architecture. But I think the jury's out until we can get some radiocarbon dates on the floor. Hi there. I'm Don Wildman, host of the new podcast, American History Hit. Twice a week, I'll be exploring stories from America's past to help us understand the United States of today. Join me as I head back in time to witness Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence, head to the battlefields during the Civil War, visit Chief Poitin as he prepares for war with English colonists, tour Central Park before it was Central Park, and a city in Tennessee which

helped build the atomic bomb. From famous battlefields to secret cities, from familiar names to lesser-known events, I'll speak with leading experts from across the United States and beyond to bring American history to life. Join me every Monday and Thursday for American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. From within these structures, Nick and his well-oiled team have unearthed thousands of Stone Age artefacts. And even the smallest of these objects have provided invaluable insight into what life was like 5,000 years ago. Excavation project officer and Stone Age pottery expert Roy Towers

was on hand to show me a few of them. So Roy, we've got some really interesting artefacts here. These all to do with pottery, is it? This is all pottery. It's called grooved ware pottery. It's very distinctive and we have about 100,000 pieces of it, which is by far the biggest collection of grooved ware pottery in the country.

It has an interesting history. The shape of the pot is very similar. It's either straight sided or a bit flower potty. And the oldest dates we have for grooved ware, although you get it right down what's now England and in Ireland, but the oldest dates we have are here in Orkney. Now I'm not saying this particular site

because we can't pin it down like that, but the oldest dates seem to be here. And then we can trace it on other Neolithic sites as we go south into Scotland and down to England and over to Ireland so it's an amazing we're not saying that people tucked a big pot under their arm and got into a boat and rode off to Clacton and sea or anything like that it's the idea of the decoration which must have really seized people's imagination and they wanted to they wanted it as well. And so what are the key features of grooved wear decoration then? It changed throughout the period the buildings we have here are from about 3,200 to about 2,500

600 something like that the earliest stuff was decorated with incisions and that is patterns cut into the exterior surface of the pot with a sharp point. That pot was really well made. It was well fired. And then they moved on to cordons, applied cordons. Now cordons are strip of clay, which they stuck onto the exterior of the pot in patterns. And then they could take little decorative slits and cuts into it as well.

And these are examples of that here. These are examples. That by the way is incision. That's incised decoration. Okay. So it goes from something like that, incision, to clay as the time goes on. To these cordons.

And then some of them were enormous. If you compare these cordons with these cordons, that thick. Oh, yes. This big bit of pot, branching from a central sort of knot. So that must have been a massive pot. I wouldn't like to lift it.

No, but it's so interesting. You can almost see the evolution of this type of pottery at this site, can't you? from a central sort of knot. So that must have been a massive pot. I wouldn't like to lift it. But it's so interesting. You can almost see the evolution of this type of pottery at this site, can't you? Whether it's from the incised to the clay with those cordons, and they get bigger and bigger and bigger as time goes on. Yeah, but they also get worse.

This stuff, the incised stuff, the earlier stuff is really well-made. It's well-fired, it's nicely decorated. Some of the decoration, the incised stuff, the earlier stuff, is really well made. It's well fired, it's nicely decorated. Some of the decoration, the incised decoration, is so fine that if you look at it under a microscope, you can see where they've carefully done a line and then stopped and then looked and then carried on again to make sure it was perfect. As it went on, pots got quite big.

The clay from which they were made became more and more filled with smashed up rock a sort of temper which makes it easier to form but they put far too much as time went on rock into it and eventually it was sort of falling. That was rubbish, absolute rubbish but it seems to illustrate a sort of change in society because they were producing lots of pot as time went on. It wasn't what we would call the quality. The importance of it probably was the decoration. So they were into bling. And so 5000 years ago in a site like the Ness of Brogda, can we imagine pots like this, grooved ware pottery, being all around the place?

It would be, yeah. Yeah, we have so much of it. It must have been all around the place. They probably had a slightly different attitude to it than we do. Sometimes we find really beautifully made stuff, even in later period, decorated very, very carefully. Now, if we had it, we would put it on our mantelpiece and say, oh, that's something special. We'll just keep it.

They used it on the fire for cooking. Yeah, so a different way, apparently, of looking at it. Though that's a bit of an assumption, but it's an odd thing to see. Now, one of the most striking things you notice from these small shards of Stone Age pottery laid out in front of you is the colour. That was a surprise to us, really. When you think about it, there's absolutely no reason

why there shouldn't be colour in the Neolithic. But you look at the site, you've seen the site, it's quite grey. So it's too easy to assume, oh, well, the Neolithic must've been a bit grey as well, a bit boring. Nope, they had colour. They had red and black and white.

We see it on the walls, some of the walls, and we see it on some of the pottery, and we've got a couple of examples here. Oh yes, I see the example here, isn't it? That's really colourful, that one, that pigment. Yep, this is a cordon, one of these, but it's come off, it's detached from the pot. You see it's got a flat back. Yes, yes. They're very easy to recognise when we're digging because it's got a flat back. But it's been decorated with hematite, which is an iron ore you get in Otney. So they've applied the

hematite and that would have been a rich red 5,000 years ago, but it's not bad now. It's pretty old and it's still got a bit of color to its face. And it's also really interesting, isn't it? That he said, that's hematite, that's an iron ore, but they're using it for decoration hundreds and hundreds of years

before the iron age is even a thing. Oh, many years, yes, many, many. And this is a black one. It's lost a bit of a surface here, but this was originally colored black all the way up to the point of this decoration here. It's a branching decoration. Cordon's going that direction, that direction. So the black is emphasising the light colour of this. Does this all serve to emphasise how, as you've hinted at just then, that the Ness of Brogda,

it would have been a very vibrant, colourful place, you know, full of all of these artistic designs, full of all of this pigment, all of this colour. Yeah, it would have been, it would have been. We haven't got the people, obviously, but I imagine they dabbed a few bits of colour on themselves. It would be nice to bring up their themselves, make them look more special. The colours, I mean, the red, yeah, that was quite easy. The black was also quite easy to work out because we wanted to know what they were so we analysed them and that's simply lamp black or soot. The white was different, we presumed and it's always dangerous in archaeology to presume something, we presumed it was a burnt bone paste and the reason for that is to the south of us in Scotland in the Bronze Age,

the period that comes after the Neolithic, beaker pots had nice incised decoration on the exterior but what they did was they filled it in with a white paste into the incisions and it really made it leap out at you. They're amazing things to see so we assume that's what it was but when we started to test it we had problems because apatite is a component of bone and we had very little appetite in our white material. Also, puzzlingly, there were tiny, tiny pieces of rock in amongst the white material. Now, bone is an organic material. What it's got to do with rock, we don't know. So this stymied us for quite a long while until we found out the answer. The answer about the appetite was simply that the burial conditions on site had been wet on and off, probably very wet. So a lot of the appetite had been washed off the white colour.

The bone was slightly embarrassing. How do you make a burnt bone paste? You take a bit of animal bone. If it's fresh, you can't smash it and grind it. It's far too resilient. So you burn it and then it becomes easier to smash and grind. And what do you smash and grind it in? The neolithic equivalent of a mortar and pestle which is rock. That's where the tiny pieces of rock came from. Slightly embarrassing but we got there in the end.

So it was a burnt bone paste. Oh interesting and because of the burnt bone paste because that's another artifact that you seem to have found in abundance here isn't it? The amount of bones so the source material is definitely there for that type of decoration to the pottery. It certainly is. I mean, you can call these people Neolithic cowboys and I wouldn't argue with you. They had lots and lots of cattle

and lots and lots of good grass, which we still do have in Orkney, to feed them. And they were big, big beasts. Really big, much bigger than today's cattle. It's fascinating how small shards of seemingly insignificant pottery can give us such a valuable insight into the vibrant, colourful nature of the Nessabrotica some 5,000 years ago, home to these Stone Age cowboys. But pottery also gives us an extraordinary insight into their diet.

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onepeloton.ca. Yeah, we can analyze the pots to find out what they were using to hold them for, storage, etc., but also cooking. If you find a bit of burnt blacky stuff inside a pot you can analyze it and you can find out what it was. If you find it on the outside of the pot forget it because that's you just be analyzing peat ash from the fire. Actually we don't even have to go as far as that now because the pot is porous, it's low-fired, so if you had some meat inside it and you were cooking it or anything indeed,

it releases lipids, fats, and they soak into the wall of the pot. So all we have to do, even if we don't have any black, gungy stuff, is take out a little piece of the pot wall and analyze it. And the studies we've done so far are, they're about 50-50 milk and meat. So that was their diet, though there is a problem.

They were lactose intolerant, which means they couldn't take milk. People still are in some places. It bloats you up and makes you feel really rotten. So if you process it into a yogurt or a cottage cheese type of thing, you can eat it perfectly well. So we think they were processing milk as well.

So that's fascinating. So from these pieces of pottery here, from all the work that you and fellow archaeologists have done, you can start to deduce the diets of the people who would have come to a meeting place like the Ness of Brogdon. That is absolutely incredible. And you can go on from trying to work out what the diet is, because that leads on to the next big question. What was the economics of the place? How were they making a living for themselves if you like? So from small beginnings you can go quite a distance. So what can they tell us about the economics then? Well they can tell us that they were very largely cattle based, although they were growing barley

as well because you can find traces of that. A lot of the scientific methods of analysis have really improved recently so we're hoping in the next two to three years to have some really detailed analysis of the contents of the pot. And that might bring up some surprises. There might be something else in there that we don't know about yet. Roy, that is really exciting indeed. And lastly, in regards to these decorations, where else do we find these sorts of decorations in the Neolithic world? And what can that also add to the picture of this interconnected Neolithic world some 5,000 years ago? You've got the word interconnected.

Where we find it, very similar decoration almost anywhere you've got a later Neolithic site, right down where there's now Britain and in Ireland. There seems to be a basic, you like vocabulary of artistic design but individual places and perhaps individual people would use that but they could they could alter it slightly themselves so it wasn't something terribly rigid but there must have been something really important about the design for them to want to use these anyway. Oh interesting and do we think that potentially it must be a big question I'm not sure you might know the answer, but potentially could these decorations, could these designs have originated from here? It's a good question, it's a very big question. It does seem as if the idea of the designs on Groovebair Pot

appear to have originated in Orkney. The oldest dates we have are from here, so far. You never know, somebody down in Sussex might find an older date but so far the oldest stuff seems to have come from here and again the idea of the pot seems to have travelled south and over to Ireland. Interesting. Do we have any idea what the decoration means? Why this particular type of decoration? Ah, killer question. No is the answer. There we go. Pretty certain they mean something. Or why would so many people have wanted to have exactly the same idea and take it away and use it?

But we have no idea what it means. And I don't think we ever will have. Now, there is one final structure that I'm keen to see before leaving the Ness. An iconic structure. An absolute beast of an ancient building. This is structure 10, which is a total departure from the architecture that's gone before. And as you say, it is truly humongous. You have a wall that really disappears out the corner of the trench there,

extends all the way back to where the camera box is sitting, cuts back across the trench and then out the other side, and then disappears again out into the unexcavated area. It's big in every respect and different in many respects. The walls originally were between four and a half to five meters thick and what they defined was basically a square chamber but with beautifully rounded internal corners and the inside of it, although most of the stone has been robbed away, when it was first constructed it must have just

looked immaculate. Different coloured sandstones, reds and yellows, some of them highly decorated. Even the orientation of this building is unusual, aligned exactly east-west so it lines not only with the Egrenault Sunrise but also May's Howe in the distance. There's a forecourt area right at the front that incorporates standing stones. You can see the stump of one just over there, originally with a beautiful hourglass-shaped hole drilled through it. So everything about TEN is just different. So when are we roughly talking with this particular structure?

This one was built probably around about 2,900 BC, but it continues right the way through to the very end of the site around about 2400 roughly but we see a whole series of changes happening with 10 just as we see with all the other structures of the nest where we see part of it collapsing, part of it being rebuilt, incorporation of new elements, new design of the interior chamber, changes in use no doubt, but then you find the final elements to the site where it's kind of infilled, demolished, but then this paved pathway that runs all the way around about it, a huge deposit of animal

bones being created there. I think in its heyday, just after it was first built, it must have been one of the most spectacular pieces of architecture in northwest Europe. What's really interesting is what happened to Structure 10 at the end of its use, at the end of its existence. Well, I think it's gone through many different phases of use and reconstruction. But at the end of its life, it seems to have lost that importance, well, physically. But I think the memory of this building continues right the way through to its very end, where we see the interior getting filled with layers of midden and rubble, almost creating a new monument, like a mound, out of this pre-existing building.

But then on the outside, along this kind of paved walkway that extends all the way around the building, we see this immense deposit of cattle bone being placed there. Well, not just cattle bone, but also some red deer carcasses. But it's the numbers of cattle which were represented by that somewhere between four and six hundred cattle. An immense feast. It seems to be they're not just maybe commemorating the Ness as it had been but it is this kind of change happening within society not kind of overnight probably over several generations but whatever the Ness represented, this feast maybe represents,

as I say, the commemoration of Structure 10, but also maybe the celebration of a new beginning. And it's interesting to know that just above that bone deposit at the back of the building, we find one of the few beaker sherds of pottery, plus also a flint-barbed and tanged arrowhead, again, classic early Bronze Age. So things are changing, things are moving on. The beginning of the Bronze Age in Britain is epitomised as a time of great radical change,

when new people ventured to Britain's shores, the so-called Beaker people. For some time, it was believed that this great shift affected Orkney's prominence, its importance in the prehistoric world that engulfed the British Isles and further afield. But now, that view of Orkney's decline in importance, well, it's changing. All too often, the Bronze Age in Orkney is seen as this kind of retro step, but suddenly the grandeur of the Neolithic is replaced by this almost kind of ephemeral Bronze Age presence but it's not. We still find here fantastic burial monuments across the islands like the Nowza Trotty just across the Loch O'Hare where there was gold discs and

amber beads discovered in a massive Bronze Age burial tomb. I think it was just a different emphasis happening in society in the Bronze Age where it was much more to do with the individual rather than the larger community. We do find some Bronze Age artefacts here, not that many when you consider the amount of archaeology that has been excavated here. But unlike the South, where we can see this kind of mass migration happening as implied by DNA analysis etc. Otme seems to have almost resisted that although we are getting anomalies occurring for instance some of the Bronze Age burials that have been excavated on the island of Westry where we do seem to have some beaker genomes occurring in the evidence but mainly in the kind of female lines. genomes occurring in the evidence, but mainly in the kind of female lines. So we are seeing things happening differently in Orkney than we do down south.

It's almost like Orkney resisted the kind of mass migration that we see further south. But I think inevitably, you know, Orkney was populated by these new people coming in. The Ness experienced its golden age as this important, interconnected meeting place during the Neolithic. But its legacy, and that of Orkney's other incredible Stone Age sites, has endured. The end of the Ness seems to almost maybe not quite epitomise the end of the Neolithic, because it isn't just this kind of overnight change from the Neolithic style of lifestyle to the Bronze Age. It's something which is

much more extended probably over several generations. But we see things like the Ring of Brodgar, although it still remains as a kind of focus for burial with some of the Bronze Age cemetery that we see around the Ring, and the Stones of Stannes. All these monuments continue to be very much parts of the landscape. It wasn't suddenly at the end of the Neolithic that they ceased to be recognised. And for instance, the stones at Stenness, we find almost later, we find much later Iron Age activity at the stones. So they're still parts of the local lifestyle, mythology almost. Their legacy lives on right to the present day and even when you look at kind of the myths and legends of Orkney within the historic period, a lot of them relate to these monuments.

And everybody puts their own interpretation on them. The Nesset Brodger excavation has already revealed so much about Stone Age Orkney. And no doubt the work of the archaeologists and volunteers here will continue to unearth extraordinary artefacts in the years ahead. And so Nick, what are the aims for the excavation for the rest of this season? The rest of the season is to actually get down to finish the floor deposits within some of these structures. It's very complex when you get down onto the kind of occupation layers. You can sometimes see hundreds of separate events.

So it's on picking all those and extracting as much information as you can. So we take hundreds, thousands of samples of various types. And so by the end of it's kind of linking all the different structures together as well, just clarifying the overall chronology of the site. And already you've excavated so much of this incredible site. How much more is there still to do? Well, I think you could have 10 lifetimes, you'd still never excavate the whole thing. But in many respects, we want to leave as much as we can for future generations of archaeologists because even in the last 20 years

since we started excavating here technology has came on in leaps and bounds new techniques we've developed new techniques as well so we want to leave much more for future generations so they can come back look at what we have done but also maybe expand and how can people get involved in this project? Well, every year I have to turn away hundreds of applications. It's a very popular dig, as you can well imagine. But if people write to me, email me, and you never know, they might be lucky. And it's also possible for these people to donate as well?

Yes, most of our funding comes through the two charities we set up, the Nessa Broadga, based in the UK, and the American Friends of the Nessa Broadga, which is registered with the IRS in America so people can make donations and as I say every little helps if any philanthropists are out there please get in touch Well there you go, there was

the debut special episode of our new Prehistoric Scotland mini-series all about Stone Age Orkney with a focus in this interview with Dr Nick Card and Roy Towers all about the incredible excavation currently underway at the Ness of Brodgar. I hope you've enjoyed the episode. Orkney is such an incredible place and I was privileged to visit there not too long ago with History Hit doing a series of podcasts like this one but of course at the centre of it all was a series of documentaries all about

prehistoric Scotland the first episode was dedicated to Stone Age Orkney you can watch that documentary now on History Hit it's called Mysteries of Prehistoric Scotland Stone Age Orkney the first of three episodes about prehistoric Scotland. We do later return to Orkney because, as hinted at in this episode today, Orkney's prominence, its incredible prehistory, doesn't end with the end of the Stone Age. It endures, particularly when you come down to the Iron Age and the erection of these incredible Iron Age towers called Brochs. So stay

tuned we'll be back in Orkney in due course when we talk more the incredible structures that were the Brochs. Anyway that's enough rambling on from me please let me know if you enjoyed this episode it really does help us as we plan out what episodes we're going to be doing in the future. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from. That also really helps us as we continue to share these incredible stories from our distant past with as many people as possible. Long may it continue to.

But that's enough rambling on from me. And I'll see you in the next episode.