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 2b: Can you discuss the need for increased and improved C14
dating in both Orkney and further afield?
I think that what we really need to do with the World Heritage Site and the Neolithic in general is basically
get more dating evidence because we’re still working on generalities regarding the relationships between
these monuments. We need to get lots of dates, apply Bayesian statistics, and redefine the development of
these structures because, for instance when you look at the Stones of Stenness – yes, we have dates for
that, probably making it one of the oldest henge monuments in Britain, but all the dates just come from the
ditch. We still don’t have any dates for the actual erection of the stones. My belief is that the stones are a
later addition.
So I think we’ve got to try and break down the landscape into much smaller chronological elements and
then we can really start to get to grips with trying to define what are religious areas, how the landscape
was divided, if it was, and I think it’s almost leading into the next question, about the boundaries within this
landscape, where we do seem to have Ring of Brodgar much as Mike Parker Pearson envisaged with Stone
Henge, being an isolated, separated bit of the landscape, maybe the realm of the ancestors where the dead
spirits were seen to go and reside.
But without clearer dating evidence – we still don’t have dates for the Ring of Brodgar really, we don’t have
dates for the construction of Maeshowe and of course unfortunately the C14 curve for this crucial time of
development of the Neolithic is this kind of plateau which makes dating exceedingly difficult. But we are
hopefully going to be part of a new, very large, C14 dating program along with Alistair Whittle, from Cardiff
University and Alec Bayliss of English Heritage, trying to refine to quite a detailed level, much as they’ve
done for many of the sites down south, so we can look at sites not just in terms of several generations or
centuries but down to very tight timescales.
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