Transcript: Jane Downes VFT 2: The Heart of Neolithic
Orkney
Question 2: What have your excavations at the Ring of Brodgar contributed
to our understanding of this site? And how could further excavation enhance
our appreciation of this monument?
The excavations at the Ring of Brodgar took place in 2008 and were directed by myself and by Colin
Richards. We were funded by Historic Scotland and had to have permission to dig here of course because
it’s a property in care. The area we were allowed to excavate – actually re-excavate – was two trenches
that had been dug by Colin Renfrew in the 1970s.
Of course we don’t, or we didn’t, have a date for the construction of the Ring of Brodgar at all. Colin
Renfrew couldn’t get any material that was dateable from his excavations. And so we anticipated that with
different methods of dating in re-excavating these two trenches we might be able to get samples that
would in fact give us a date for the construction of the monument, without which this monument sits
focussed in the World Heritage area without us knowing in fact how it relates to the other monuments that
have been inscribed as having World Heritage status. So, for example, we know that the Stones of Stenness
is a very early henge monument (about 3300 BC) but we don’t know how much earlier or later the Ring of
Brodgar is (or at least we didn’t until we undertook our excavations).
So in terms of the kind of method of dating we used, we used optically stimulated luminescence; that was
undertaken by David Sanderson from the Scottish Universities Research and Reactor Centre in East Kilbride.
It meant that he took a lot of samples throughout the section profile that we exposed in our excavation.
The conclusions of that work are that the monument was probably created around 2600 or 2400 BC. So we
see that it’s actually quite substantially later than the Stones of Stenness so for quite some period in the
Heart of Neolithic Orkney they would have had the Stones of Stenness standing and a pretty quiet area
where the Ring of Brodgar now stands. This shows that the Ring of Brodgar is therefore contemporary with
some of the major phases of the construction of Stone Henge itself.
The other aspect of the excavation that revealed results was looking at the type of construction of the
ditch. The major ditch that surrounds the stone circle we found was excavated or dug by the people
originally in segments, in sausage shaped segments, which were then broken through to produce the
continuous ditch form that we see today. That related to the sourcing of the stones and seeing that they’re
coming from different parts of Orkney again reinforces this idea of communal effort in the construction
itself or the Ring of Brodgar. It also produces a question in our minds as to whether the monument was a
completed monument for very long and whether, in fact, for most of its life during the Neolithic, or during
the period of its use (in inverted commas) it stood as an incomplete monument and that the whole purpose
of it was its construction by the community groups that were coming together not the completed
monument itself.
We had hoped to be able to excavate in the ditch terminals of which of course there are four because there
are two entrances into the monument. At other henge monuments where the ditch terminals have been
excavated these locations have been found to be collection points of artefacts where people have
concentrated deposition of artefacts maybe as they’ve come in and out of the monument. We anticipate
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Transcript: Jane Downes VFT 2: The Heart of Neolithic
Orkney
01/04/13
that this could be a good point for finding artefacts, for in the excavations undertaken both by Colin
Renfrew and ourselves we didn’t find any artefactual evidence at all.
The other aspect of our investigations was geophysical survey which we undertook to see how many stones
there were originally within the circle and also what might have happened to the material that was
excavated to create the ditch of which there would have been a huge amount as the ditch is massive.
We found that there were probably originally 60 stones as the impression is given when you’re at the
monument. The stones would be quite close together and fairly regularly spaced with about 5m in
between, apart from when you come to the entranceways. We found that they closed up so they were only
about 3m apart at either of the entranceways. This gives the impression when you’re entering the
monument or exiting it of these ‘doorways’ at each entrance where you’ve got the stones much closer
together.
We didn’t find what happened to the material that was excavated from the ditch. It’s possible that it’s
spread across the centre of the monument but it certainly isn’t the case that it was a bank outside the
monument; and in that sense Brodgar isn’t a typical henge monument as it doesn’t appear to have had an
external bank.
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