Question 3: What has your work on the submerged landscapes at the Loch of Harray and the Loch of Stenness told us about early prehistoric Orkney?
I think it’s really emphasised for me the close relationship between people and the land. And it’s emphasised perhaps how we do have to think ourselves into a totally different world view when we’re dealing with early prehistory.
It’s very easy to takes the sites of early prehistory, sites like the Ring of Brodgar and The Ness of Brodgar and the Standing Stones of Stenness and plonk them down onto the present landscape and then go out and walk around them and think as if it’s really just us, living a kind of Flintstones life but that wasn’t the case at all. These people are living and working in a very close relationship with the world around them, a world that is changing constantly – so they’re not used to stability in the way that we are.
We’re all very concerned today about sea level rise because we’re going from a period of relative stability into a period of change. For them it was the other way round, they came from a period of change and they would have no reason to think that that change would stop. Unknown to them the pace of sea level chance as we move into the Bronze Age was going to slow down so that the landscape would approach the landscape that we know today and the change that they were living with would have stopped.
I’m not sure that they would have worried about change in the way that we do because it was normal for them, it was what they accepted. It was the way the world worked.
We can talk about all the physical impacts of land diminishing, about worrying about where your fields might be, but it isn’t just a physical relationship it’s a whole mind-set. And perhaps for me it does just emphasise that it was something different.
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