Transcript: VFT 2: Orkney - Interview with Antonia Thomas,
PhD student, Orkney college, UHI
Q1a: Can you discuss your work on decorated stones at the Ness of Brodgar,
comparing this with findings at Skara Brae?
My name’s Antonia Thomas, I’m currently researching an AHR funded PhD at Orkney College. I’m looking at
inscriptions, Neolithic inscriptions mainly, from Orkney and focussing my research on the carved stone
assemblage from the Ness of Brodgar.
The excavations at the Ness of Brodgar have been going on for, I think this is going to be the eighth year,
and over that time many of the huge structures that we’ve found on site have been found to be decorated
with these carved stones and this forms part of a wider assemblage of megalithic art or rock art that’s
found across the UK but until recently there’s not been very much at all in Orkney.
There have been a few examples known from Skara Brae, which Childe investigated in the 1930s and
recorded many of these carved stones. More recently there’s been a few known from the tombs in Orkney,
Maeshowe and also some earlier examples of quite beautifully pecked spiral decorated stones from several
tombs such as the home of Papa Westray and Eday Manse, but until recently it was only really Skara Brae
that exhibited any examples of these decorated stones in Orkney, until that is the excavations at the Ness
of Brodgar which have now turned up hundreds, literally hundreds, of these stones.
They range from some that have very light scratches, seemingly forming no pattern at all, to some very
elaborately carved designs with zig-zags and chevrons, ladder designs, and also pecked stones and cup
marked stones. These have been found in all the buildings across the site. Also, most notably in structure
10, they seem to be part of a form of decoration, especially with the coloured stones that we’re finding in
that structure. And my work, for the moment, for my PhD is that I’m going through all these stones, both
the ones that are in situ on the walls on site and the ones we’ve removed which are now in the finds shed
at Orkney College. I’m going through all these and I’m drawing them and photographing them and trying to
make some sort of sense of this quite sizeable assemblage [which] is over 400 stones now.
One of the most interesting things about having them at the Ness of Brodgar, as opposed to Skara Brae for
example, is that because the Ness of Brodgar is undergoing excavation at the moment, under modern
conditions, we have a wealth of contextual information which is missing from Skara Brae (it was essentially
cleared out in the 1930s by Childe very much with the purpose of opening it up as a site for the public by
the Ministry of Works) but it’s very interesting to have Skara Brae with its walls standing above head height
in many of the houses and the Neolithic art work that’s found there and to use it as a comparison site for
what we’re finding at the ness of Brodgar. And there some quite notable similarities between the two sites,
not only in terms of their architecture but also in terms of the decorated stone work. The passages as well
as the interiors of the structures at Skara Brae are where you find most of the carvings and we’re finding
the same at the Ness of Brodgar. Indeed, the kind of passageway between structure 1 and 7 is very similar
to the passageway outside of House 7 at Skara Brae and the carvings found there. In terms of the kind of
design, again the similar kinds of motifs and methods are being seen at the Ness of Brodgar as we find at
Skara Brae: similar designs and zig-zags and ladder motifs but one of the things I’m looking at with my
research is trying to look beyond these forms of artwork. Many studies in the past have looked at this sort
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Transcript: VFT 2: Orkney - Interview with Antonia Thomas,
PhD student, Orkney college, UHI
05/06/13
of things as a means of encoding some sort of symbol or hidden meaning but actually, looking at the
techniques of carving and the more embodied aspects of working the stone, in addition to the contextual
information from the excavations, [we are] forming a much more rounded picture of how these stones
might have been meaningful in the Neolithic.
The interesting thing about the Ness is the size of the assemblage to start with – it’s quite incredible and
part of that can be explained by the fact that it is being dug now, so we’re finding things in rubble contexts
and in demolition debris and rubble spreads that probably with Skara Brae would just have been cleared
out but then with Skara Brae, with the level of preservation you would expect to have a lot more in situ and
at the ness of Brodgar there is a huge amount in situ. So in that sense the Ness of Brodgar exceeds the
assemblage at Skara Brae. In terms of the type of carvings and inscriptions, they are very similar. Where the
Ness of Brodgar differs is in the pecked decoration, the cup marked stones and also the Pict dressing that
we’re finding on some of the stonework and that’s not really in evidence at Skara Brae. So I think a lot of it
is the visibility and it is to do with it being excavated under modern conditions, and because we’ve found so
many at the Ness, we’re looking for them. But then, Skara Brae has been looked [at] again by LeckieShepherd, Elizabeth Shee Twohig (as part of her corpus on megalithic art) and they did find some more but
not anywhere near the number you’d expect if it was going to compare with the Ness of Brodgar; so there
is something quite exceptional going on there.
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