The Orkney archaeological dig with memories of Scotland past

“And that’s not all” says the archaeologist guide “because what happened next is quite incredible”.

“The people living here then placed a cup-shaped stone with the skull of a cow in the centre of the hearth, filled the whole hall with midden, and then pushed in the walls.”

“And that’s not all either” she continues, eyes dancing in the wind with joy at this story of painstaking discovery, “about a hundred years later they came back and feasted on around 400 cattle, and left their thigh bones and skulls around the edge.

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“Fifty years on they did the same again but with deer bones. And then they dug down and took away the large stones for other purposes and we don’t know where these now are.”

I’m standing on the Ness of Brodgar. It’s the middle of summer and Open Day in the very last year of the Archaeological Dig of the Century. The one which has re-written the understanding of the monumentality of Stone Henge, which, it now appears, was the not the centre of everything in the South of England, but a satellite, an after thought, a knock-off, inspired, the archaeologists seem to think, by whatever was going on at the Ness of Brodgar on Orkney Mainland.

It’s eight degrees and blowing a hoolie. I’ve lost the feeling in my fingers. Another guide laughs and says “There are two hair-cuts on Orkney: the Southwest and the North East. They both look the same. You have to wear a tam or a head band” she lilts.

Whatever was going on. “We don’t know.”

I’m struck by the manner and turns of speech of this most humble of academic disciplines. These scholars spend their time on their knees, digging, or peering down microscopes analysing tiny particulates of soil, or painstakingly cataloguing finds in finds boxes, for future archaeologists to study.

After 20 years digging at the Ness the site closed this year on August 16. The sheer amazing quantity of finds is such that it will take an estimated 20 years just to analyse and write up. And there is a monumental task ahead for this Unesco World Heritage Site, in curating and considering how to tell the story of the estimated 10% only of finds which have been unearthed in the dig, led for 20 years by Professor Nick Card of University of the Highlands and Islands.

I’m spending time this year visiting all of Scotland’s Unesco sites and cities and thinking alongside the precision and care of the academics and curators of these places, with the themes of my own Unesco Chair in Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and Arts. The Heart of Neolithic Orkney was designated a World Heritage Site in December 1999.

One of the things about thinking about how we do history, and how we do archaeology, ie the study of the past, when there simply is no one around to put a spin on things with words, tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the past.

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One of the striking aspects at the Ness are the exceptionally fine drystane dykes and the walls of the structures. They are stunning. The use of the Caithness stone by people 5000–4000 years ago points to craftsmanship of the highest order, and the need to show off, by whoever gathered here to eat all those cows, and to be present of what were probably large ceremonies.

Dr Martha Johnson’s PhD “Rocks Matter” has documented the geological composition and origin of each stone and where it was found in the structure offering, in lay terms, a geological map of stones selected, by their origin, in each wall. In the exhibition is a box entitled “foreign stone”. It’s a label redolent with suggestive meaning. Who brought the “foreign stone” from far afield, and far from Orkney?

Obviously, someone had to bring the stone for inclusion in this monumental structure when it was being built. The archaeologists speculate that the process of building may have been more important than its use and I think of my own life lived as a member of the Iona Community where older members tell of the days of yore, when they were rebuilding Iona Abbey, a “hard common task” undertaken as an act of peace and reconciliation between the wars. When the process of rebuilding was accomplished the community of scholars, ministers and craftspeople were a bit lost in purpose.

Many “foreign objects” and quarried stone from other islands, notably from Tormore Quarry on the Isle of Mull, were used. There is the tale of timber cargo from a ship from Norway, washing up on the north shore just in time to be used in the vaulting of the refectory. Members of the community laugh at these stories – they are myth, legend, and also fact.

There are truths here but the stories now told are what overlay any accuracy in engineering. “And if you think that’s a coincidence” the founder of the Iona Community, George Macleod, was want to say, “then I wish you a very dull life.”

It’s certainly not a dull life that the archaeologists at the Ness are living over 20 years of summer gatherings and digs. Each of them taking turns on the open day tours to tell us of what it’s like, to be working here, and in this, the last year. Voices are already starting to crack with emotion at the decommissioning of the site – yet another in its long history of being placed out of active use – scheduled for the end of the summer.

The archaeologists are taking pains to explain why this is the right decision. They know this in their heads, their discipline and knowledge and training but it’s clear from their hearts that this is also life, and a good life, even as it is also work. “We have to protect the remains… From the weather … they are eroding ... we have to write it up … we have to analyse … This is when the real work begins … Trying to understand … piecing together facts and evidence … telling the story.”

Perhaps this was also what people thought as they repeatedly built and rebuilt thousands of years ago on the Ness. We have to do different work now. We have to protect in different ways. We have to find a way to tell the story of what we found here, experienced here … of buried carved balls and sea eagle wings. But we don’t know what will happen after we have decommissioned. Not really. And we will need more hands and minds and imaginations.

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Maybe in 1000 years – if we are spared as a species– there will be archaeologists digging and wondering about the activities on the Ness from 2004 -2024. Maybe they will find strange deposits of something called plastic … something which is made of foreign materials, drilled at great risk and expense under the sea and under the land, and used in vastly polluting industries to make something called plastic. And this was transported to this place – it’s found in a deposit layer of around 100 years in the earth and clearly was destructive but plentiful, preceding and encompassing a time of plague – and then rapid and devastating climate change which would have wiped out much of the human life, and flora and fauna. But for those who remained there was an interest in what endured, and was found beneath the surface.

Such forebearers may ask questions as to why digging stopped at the site and as to where the objects are – one or two have been found in an old ruin, a place visited by foreigners often, in a place once called Kirkwall, alongside Viking finds and some Pictish stones. But why? What was the purpose of moving items found in the plastic era elsewhere? And why did people go to so much trouble to make a material so utterly destructive, in fact known to be a producer of the catastrophic changes that came.

I look out East from the Ness towards nearby Maes Howe, a neolithic burial cairn, aligned with the “watch stone”, a single standing stone marking the passage of the winter solstice when light is cast at the back of the burial cairn, where many bodies were interred, together.

What relationship might this site of plastic and bones have, where there are so few human bones remaining, to another site, away over the Mediterranean sea, where thousands and thousands and thousands of unburied bodies have been found inside the rubble, a site of seeming frenzied ritual slaughter, a mass grave, under the burning sun, and dating to the same time as the decommissioning of the dig.

As I said, it’s no accident what we study, and the thoughts circulating in the present are bound, despite the very best efforts of the most rigorous of sciences, to raise their haunting questions as we dig, and listen.

Alison Phipps is Unesco Chair for Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and Arts at University of Glasgow