Archaeology Magazine - January/February 2013 - 42

Painted stonework at the Ness of Brodgar

Orkney’s Artists
NSIDE STRUCTURE 10, also known as the “cathedral,” the discovery of ancient grinding stones, containing little hollows and the remains of pigments, indicates that the paints daubed on the walls and brushed onto the pots at the Ness of Brodgar complex were made by grinding down locally derived minerals and mixing them with animal fat or egg white to create a paste. “The nearby island of Hoy is known to produce hematite [an iron ore used to make diﬀerent colored pigments], and not far away from the Ness there is a known source of galena, a lead-bearing ore that can produce a white pigment,” says Scott Pike, an archaeological geologist from Willamette University in Oregon, who has been analyzing the Ness paintwork. X-ray ﬂuorescence spectroscopy carried out by Pike and his team has shown that the colors are chemically distinct from the stone walls, conﬁrming that they were painted on and not naturally occurring. It seems that only certain parts of the walls were painted (such as the stones surrounding a door), and only a small percentage of the pots were colored. What the colors signiﬁed remains a mystery. “These colors are sometimes taken as a strong reference to the self, the body, and its ﬂuids, but colors such as red, white, and black could also refer to ﬁre and its transformative eﬀects. Certain colors and patterns could also have signiﬁed ownership,” says Roy Towers of the University of the Highlands and Islands. Meanwhile, the carved artwork emerging from the Ness of Brodgar is puzzling archaeologists. A huge variety of types of inscriptions has been found across the site, but

Carved slab at the Ness of Brodgar

some of the most elaborately carved stones were found in dark corners and deep recesses, where they wouldn’t have been fully visible. Possibly the act of carving the stone was more important than viewing it afterward. Meanwhile, some of the faint scratchings are barely visible with the naked eye, leading to speculation that the bold designs may have been scratched through pigment.

“land of the living” at the Stones of Stenness, from the “land of the ancestors” at the Ring of Brodgar, and thus represented a place of transition. Card thinks this is plausible, and wonders if each nearby community had its own special building at the Ness site. “I think that these communities may have been ﬁercely competitive, each trying to outdo each other, with visible shows of prestige and power,” he says. Gradually, environmental changes appear to have intensiﬁed competition between communities, perhaps leading to a more hierarchical form of society, something that Card believes is reﬂected in the changes of building style. During this portion of the Neolithic, Orkney’s land was slowly sinking due to a phenomenon called glacial rebound. When glaciers melt, the land (which ﬂoats upon the Earth’s molten mantle), relieved of the weight, rises like a ship with its cargo removed. As this was happening in western Scotland, Orkney was left on the other end of a seesaw, being pushed down. Valuable farmland was submerged by rising waters. “This changing landscape would have made life quite stressful and the ﬂourishing of sophisticated monuments may have partly been a response to this changing landscape,” says Caroline Wickham-Jones, from the University of Aberdeen, who has studied the sea-level change in the area. People may have turned to spiritual matters to make sense of the changes around them. The monuments and associated ceremonies may have helped the society organize and work together, but also likely reinforced a social hierarchy and the rise of powerful leaders who made decisions for everyone. And as the water continued to slowly rise—a process that continues today—the neck of land at the Ness of Brodgar is likely to have taken on even greater spiritual importance, as the only dry passage between the two stone circles. For the people living at the Barnhouse settlement, it appears that the rising waters took their toll around 2700 B.C., when the site was abandoned. “We think the boggier land may have made it too diﬃcult for them to grow crops, and they abandoned the village,” explains Wickham-Jones. And around the same time, a new phase of building began at the Ness of Brodgar. Excavations have revealed that the oval-shaped buildings were replaced by several much larger buildings with more angular architecture, including internal stone “piers” that divide the buildings into rectangular alcoves. These buildings are three or four times larger than the dwellings uncovered at Orkney’s most famous Neolithic village, Skara Brae, about ﬁve miles away. “Skara Brae is like a shantytown in comparison to this,” says Card. Some of the new buildings slice over portions of the old oval buildings, suggesting a fresh start and a new way of doing things. Four of these newer structures have been excavated, revealing a series of features: “The combination of hearths, piers, and upright slabs would have guided people’s passage through the buildings and deﬁned how diﬀerent parts of the building were used,” explains Towers. One of these buildings, known as Structure 8, has been excavated down to ﬂoor level across half of the interior, providing clues as to how the building was used. The building, which measures 60 by 29 feet, contains four pairs of stone piers, creating 10 alcoves. The central area contains at least
ARCHAEOLOGY • January/February 2013

Archaeology Magazine - January/February 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - January/February 2013