Professor Mike Parker Pearson Institute of Archaeology,
University College London VFT 1: South Uist
Question 3: What do we know about changing settlement patterns on the
machair from prehistory to the modern day? (5:58)
One of the exciting aspects of our work was to discover that there’s been tremendous change in people’s
lives. It wasn’t simply that they started living on the machair back in the early Bronze Age, 4000 years ago,
and now they don’t, but it was also to see that the whole organisation of people’s lives had changed at
various times in the past. And taking it through time, the formation of the machair seems to have been a
dramatic moment about 5000 years ago when these large quantities of shell sand covered the whole of the
west coast, and we have to remember that water levels were lower at that time, the sea level has risen and
covered quite a lot of the land that is now underwater out on the west coast. So, at that time it was a
completely new land to occupy and at that point the people we call Beaker People because of the
distinctive pottery that they used came and settled in this machair zone. And we’ve found traces of their
houses and settlements all the way down the west coast not just of South Uist but of the other islands.
And after that we see the landscape gradually filling up. At Cladh Hallan we have a very large Beaker into
Bronze Age, and ultimately into Iron Age, settlement; people living in the same area over thousands of
years and it was there that we found skeletons under the roundhouses and some of those we have been
able to demonstrate had been mummified before they were buried. Now in terms of the big changes in
people’s lives it seems that there was a major change somewhere around 200 or 100 BC because it’s then
that the density of their villages, or their hamlets really, along that coast seems to have increased. So that
instead of being spaced maybe 5 to 10 km apart (so 7 miles apart) we see much closer packing, so less than
a mile, about 1km in fact, between each settlement. And seems to be quite interesting is that these are
small communities, and where we’ve investigated a cluster of them around Dun Mhulan, which includes
the sites at Bornais and Cill Donnain, we have houses from the same period. These are the classic
roundhouses, which includes brochs and wheelhouses, and what we’re discovering is that they were used
in different ways; the people of the broch had a slightly different lifestyle to those in the other. We have
found that they had a greater quantity of pork in their diet than those living in the other settlements. And it
looks like they were even brought joints of pork from other communities on the island.
We’ve also discovered that the Cill Donnain wheelhouse was part of a much larger settlement and probably
a very wealthy one. The evidence for metal working, that is for working iron and bronze tools and
ornaments, is something that’s quite distinctive there but it’s not found at the Dun Mhulan broch or at
Bornais. So it seems that these were places that had different aspects to offer the entire community. They
were part of a network, rather than isolated single farmhouses.
Everything changed with the coming of the Vikings: language, material culture (new styles of longhouse
building) and yet some things did stay the same. Most of the settlements seemed to have kept to the same
places as their Iron Age predecessors, so there are elements of continuity. The making of pottery was
something that was particular to this part of the world. Pottery is usually very rare in Viking communities
around Europe but there was a lot of it produced in these islands. So, what we can see form the settlement
patterns is that we have places with their Viking names – these are the settlements where people had been
living beforehand. So there’s an element of continuity despite the major changes.
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Professor Mike Parker Pearson Institute of Archaeology,
University College London VFT 1: South Uist
11/02/13
Of course very few people live on the machair today it’s often quite hard to understand that hundreds of
years ago, let alone thousands of years ago, it was where probably most people seemed to live. So, it’s
interesting to think about when they left it and why they did. And it seems they began moving away
probably soon after the Viking period if not towards the end of that time around a thousand years ago. So
that by the 19th century there were a few large townships left, of people on the machair but by and large it
seems as if most people had moved off already. But whether most people moved off all in one go, or at
different moments in the past, we’re not entirely sure but we have to remember that it was an immensely
productive area of land where people grew crops and where they lived their lives. So what we see today is
very different to how it would have looked in past ages.
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