Transcript: VFT 2: Orkney World Heritage Site - Interview
with Martin Carruthers, Orkney College, UHI
Question 2: Looking at the Heart of Neolithic Orkney WHS, what can we say
about the relationship between ‘domestic’ and ‘ritual’ during the Neolithic?
It’s interesting. I think we can approach the concepts of domestic and ritual in a number of different ways
and there’s a number of different ways into them but certainly if you start off at the Stones of Stenness
themselves, there’s some very interesting features uncovered in the excavations that were undertaken
there in the 1970s by the late great Graeme Ritchie. And unusually, perhaps in terms of henge archaeology,
there were a suite of features revealed at Stenness that are much clearer in terms of what they actually
represent than is perhaps customary in most excavations of henges. Henge excavations usually tend to be a
bit equivocal in that regard and; quite often it is the case that there is a paucity of material actually
recovered archaeologically from the interiors of henges despite how much archaeologists would like to be
able to grapple with them.
So at Stenness we’re very luck y to have actually quite a number of features and one of the most striking
and interesting of those was a substantial stone setting located approximately centrally within the
enclosure ditch of the henge there. And that arrangement consists of four big stones and a square layout
and it really resembles the domestic hearths of that period, of the later Neolithic. And in fact the recovery
of peat ash and burnt organic material from inside that setting during the excavations, I think, should very
much encourage us to view that feature as a hearth albeit a very big, monumental, one. Now the central
presence of that hearth within the circle space at Stenness immediately brings to mind the centrality of the
hearth within circular homes of contemporary Later Neolithic villages like the ones we have evidence for
from Skara Brae, the Ness of Brodgar, and indeed nearby at Barnhouse.
Now that idea that there may be some connection there between the domestic architecture and what we
might call for the moment the ritual architecture of the henges is given even more weight I’d say when the
fact that we have to take on board that the remains of an earlier dismantled hearth setting at Stenness was
found; and Colin Richards who excavated at Barnhouse has argued that those remains, these sockets, for
that earlier stone slab setting, came from a substantial ceremonial hearth that we know once existed in the
nearby Barnhouse settlement. So Richards argues that there’s a direct transportation of the hearth stones
from the Barnhouse village to the henge at Stenness and that maybe that reinforced the link between the
two places and that that relates to the social histories and the memory of the community at Barnhouse.
And I suppose that the deep involvement of the ancestral villages of Barnhouse in the on-going ceremonial
practices that are suspected to be underway at the henge.
That’s interesting because what it seems to indicate to us is that there’s a kind of homology at work
between the forms of architecture that we see in the later Neolithic across things like the domestic
architectures, the ceremonial architectures, of places like the henges and the circles of standing stones and
indeed even perhaps in terms of the great tombs like Maeshowe which of course lies nearby also.
Perhaps what we’re seeing is that in its heyday the core of the domestic settlement at Barnhouse may well
have been suffused with domestic rituals and it’s possible to say something more about that site in this
field trip, in another recording, but the layout and the organisation of the domestic space can be seen to
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Transcript: VFT 2: Orkney World Heritage Site - Interview
with Martin Carruthers, Orkney College, UHI
12/03/13
reflect and maintain a particular social and ritual order both within the individual houses at Barnhouse and
also between those houses and the other villages in terms of the village layout.
So what that’s perhaps telling us is that ritual was part and parcel of the structure of everyday life in a way
that’s sometimes less the case in our secular age where we perhaps hive off the formal ritual and religious
aspects of our lives; that’s to say if we participate in those at all. We hive them off from the ordinary and
from the day to day.
And where we even have a tradition of separating our religious time during the course of the week with a
special day given over to it: the Sabbath or Sunday. And for Neolithic Orcadians I suspect that it would be
far more likely that ritual was embedded in all the various aspects of their lives and indeed all the practical
business of subsistence and farming was drawn into their religious and ideological beliefs and values and I
think the way I which this architectural continuum operates across the tombs, the houses and the henge
monuments perhaps is indicative of that embedded ritual and religious aspect to people’s lives. But I think
that the relationship between ritual and domestic is probably a complex one and it’s not necessarily
something that’s static or historically stable across the whole of the later Neolithic and it maybe varies
through time at sites like Barnhouse because towards the end of the sequence of occupation at the
Barnhouse village there’s a new building, Structure 8 as it’s known by the excavators, constructed on the
south side of the village and that building’s much bigger than the other buildings, it’s a thick walled thing; a
fairly substantial chunky edifice. It’s square in shape and it’s got rounded corners and the whole building’s
surrounded by an encircling sub-circular enclosure wall that serves to enlarge the girth of the building and
makes it more substantial and monumental. And interestingly the entrances of that building, and its outer
enclosure, are offset from each other so that anyone entering or exiting Structure 8 couldn’t simply
approach the building directly but they had to enter the outer enclosure on the east side and then move
around that space between the other enclosure and the central building to enter the roofed building on its
northern end.
Now if that wasn’t interesting enough, there’s a further feature that also complicates the business of easily
accessing the building there because actually located within the threshold area of Structure 8 itself is a
stone hearth setting, and you would have to pass over that hearth on your way in or out of Structure 8. So
that’s pretty interesting and perhaps strange and at first sight it seems bizarrely counter-productive to
making your way in and out of that building very easily but it seems that the whole space there was
designed in order to create difficulty or some sort of ordeal or sort of passage on your way into or out of
that set of building remains. Inside that building there’s a large central hearth and the archaeological
residues and remains from the hearth indicate that it was a focus for food activities and perhaps
ceremonies revolving round the consumption of food and the display and deposition of pitch stone which is
a very specific green volcanic type of glassy stone. And that’s an exotic material brought in from the Isle of
Arran in the Firth of Clyde way down hundreds of miles to the south west.
Now, another really weird and fascinating aspect of this hearth is that we know from the excavations
undertaken by Richards that it’s actually a replacement of one that actually predated the construction of
that building, Structure 8, by quite a period of time, perhaps several generations and Richards has made a
cogent argument that the stones from this earlier hearth were actually physically transported over to the
nearby henge monument at Stenness around the time that Structure 8 was being constructed. And
Richards has argued for this building, Structure 8, at Stenness [Barnhouse] as being a ceremonial house.
So, again what you see if this interesting entanglement of ritual and village life; the social and the religious
and spiritual aspects amalgamated with practical and subsistence-based activity. What we see perhaps is
the relationship between the ordinary every day and ritual perhaps changes over time so it’s quite a
complex thing perhaps.
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