Transcript: VFT 2: The Heart of Neolithic Orkney,
interview with Nick Card, Director of the Ness of
Brodgar excavations and Senior Project Manager at
ORCA
Question 2: How have the findings from the Ness of Brodgar challenged
existing interpretations of the Orcadian Neolithic?
Well I think that when you look at a map of the World Heritage Sites even 20 years ago… 30 years ago, all it
was was a set of isolated monuments in the landscape but with the discovery of the Barnhouse settlement
back in the late 1970s/early 1980s, by Colin Richards, then suddenly you started to get a feeling that
perhaps the landscape wasn’t as empty as it would appear to us today.
The discoveries at the Ness in conjunction with other research, in particular the World Heritage Geophysics
Program, is really filling this landscape making it clear that it wasn’t a landscape populated by people; it was
a landscape that was populated monuments and large constructs.
I think the thoughts in the past that it was a relatively small population in a place like Orkney in the
Neolithic is being challenged by the amount of construction work, large construction work, that no doubt
was going on in Orkney during the Neolithic.
I think what the Ness also challenges is this idea of all of it being community-led - I think there were
aspects, as I hinted in the last question, of the development of hierarchies, much like Mike Parker Pearson
is seeing with developments around Stone Henge and his Riverside project. But it’s the scale of things that
is really quite mind-blowing. When you look at the henges in the past: yes they represented tens of
thousands of hours of construction work but then you come to the Ness and it really is several magnitudes
bigger. When you look at the form of the buildings and the fact that they’re enclosed within this massive
walled enclosure with a wall anything up to six metres wide in parts then you’re looking at a huge amount
of quarrying stone, mobilisation of people, and all the kind of network that would have been necessary to
support that type of endeavour. It really makes everything seem bigger and better really.
I think that the discovery of the Barnhouse settlement, right in the midst of a so-called ritual landscape,
really did throw the cat amongst the pigeons. And the separating out of religious and secular has always
been, really, wrong. I think that what to us is religious was a much more integrated part of the life of
Neolithic people.
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