Question 2: How did the discovery and excavation of the Barnhouse settlement challenge traditional interpretations of the Orcadian Neolithic? (3:01)
The discovery and excavation of Barnhouse was very important because up until that time there was only really one late-Neolithic settlement known on the mainland, at Skara Brae, Rousay, Ringyo and Westray links of norcland, so, very few settlements. These were generally coastal and archaeologist Euan McKay has actually claimed that these weren’t real settlements, they weren’t representative, they were for ‘astronomer priests’ I think. So, he had these very much as elite residences. So, to find a second one, and of course now we’ve found seven or eight or nine of these, even just on mainland, it was quite important to show that a) these stone build houses weren’t necessarily special, everybody lived in a stone built house, and b) that they were right the way across Orkney; and c) that actually there was one right next to a so-called ritual monument. Now you have to remember, up until that time people talk about ‘ritual landscapes’ which were kind of devoid of habitation, people avoiding them; held over over for certain special ceremonial occasions. Well this really put that to death instantly. And in fact, as the excavations went on we found that the same types of pottery were being used at the Stones of Stenness for instance, as at Barnhouse and we were able to tie in the stone circles with settlement, and then actually go on to explain or give some interpretation as to why these things were there.
The ability to excavate an entire settlement was quite good. There were pluses and minuses. The plus was that you could excavate and whole settlement because it was literally only standing a few horse courses high; and of course the drawback then was that you didn’t have the huge build-up of deposits that you get from something like Skara Brae but I would say that the former outweighed the latter. Because we were able to excavate most of the settlement we were able to see that there was actually an interesting structure to the organisation of settlement in the village itself; that is the concentric rings of settlement, of houses. And these different rings, two main rings, using different types of pottery and clearly relating to some sort of difference in social identity. Equally, neither of these two concentric rings shared the same drainage. So there was clearly an element of taboo about pollution and so on involved. Basically, we were able, for the first time, to look at a turn-of-the-third-millennium-BC settlement in a level where you could actually talk about the sort of spatial configurations, the spatial organisation, and the different practices occurring in different places, plus the fact that no settlement had really been dug on that scale so it was really exciting; so we really enjoyed ourselves digging.
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