Transcript: VFT 2: Orkney World Heritage site - Interview
with Ingrid Mainland, Orkney College UHI
Q1: Excavation of a wide range of Neolithic sites across Orkney provides an
unusually large and diverse faunal assemblage for this period. What does
this material tell us about the role of animals within Neolithic society?
I’m Doctor Ingrid Mainland. I’m a lecturer in Archaeology at the University of the Highlands and Islands,
Orkney College. My research interests deal with animals and archaeozoologists and I’ve been undertaking
work on the faunal assemblages from the site of the Ness of Brodgar. This is expanding our understanding
of the Neolithic relationships with animals.
Within Orkney there have been excavations on Neolithic sites dating back to antiquarian excavations and
obviously on-going up until present and as a result of those excavations through the years we’ve got quite a
large, overall record of faunal usage and human relationships with animals in Orkney. We’ve got a range of
different types of site represented with faunal remains, from the chamber cairns through to the two
settlement sites and these span the Early Neolithic up unto to the Late Neolithic. It has to be said,
however, that some of the materials, some of the faunal material from the chamber cairns in particular,
because they were excavated during early periods of archaeological endeavour, they are not as well
recorded as some of the later collections, and therefore information is a little more limited. But
nevertheless they can give us some insight into animal usage.
Now what these assemblages have shown us is that we have a range of domestic species represented. We
have cattle, we have sheep, we have pig, we have dog, and then we also have utilisation of red deer.
Now red deer are quite interesting because red deer are not currently found in Orkney. They probably
would have gone extinct somewhere round about the Viking/Norse period. They are present from the
earliest Neolithic sites onwards in Orkney and the question arises, how did they actually get to Orkney and I
think there is still some on-going debate about this; as to whether they arrived on their own steam, i.e.
whether they managed to swim across the Pentland Firth at some point or whether they were brought here
by Neolithic settlers, or whether they were brought here by some form of exchange or certainly movement
of people. So there is some question about how red deer got here, but certainly by the time we look at the
sites, the faunal assemblages from this date, we clearly have red deer present.
The question is also open as to the early domestication of the animals. Of the domesticates we found and
where they are derived from because it seems unlikely that we would have had wild cattle in Orkney and it
seems more likely that the first cattle in Orkney would have been domestic animals which would have had
to have been brought to Orkney. And obviously a similar argument can be made for sheep because sheep
are not an indigenous species to Orkney nor indeed to Europe so the domesticated sheep must have been
brought to Orkney at some point, whether by trade or exchange amongst early farmers or whether by an
influx of farmer migrants themselves. It’s unclear and certainly faunal levels can’t answer that question at
the moment.
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Transcript: VFT 2: Orkney World Heritage site - Interview
with Ingrid Mainland, Orkney College UHI
15/03/133
Pigs may well have been domesticated in Orkney; there is perhaps some possibility of wild boar being
present. But again we really don’t know because we don’t have any Mesolithic sites in Orkney with faunal
assemblages that can allow us to look at the pre-domesticated fauna.
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