Although these people predated the Grooved Ware culture, they did build stone dwellings similar to those at Skara Brae.8 The earliest stone houses built on the Orkney Isles—in fact, anywhere in the British Isles—are on the island of Papa Westray, to the north of Mainland Isle. The remains of this small settlement, called the Knap of Howar, now consist of two round-cornered, rectangular stone buildings, linked by passageways. The walls of their seaward-facing sides, where the entrances are situated, are aboveground, but the rest of the dwellings are built into the sloping hillside. They share many features found at Skara Brae but date from around five hundred years earlier. These are in fact the oldest preserved houses anywhere in northern Europe, dating from even earlier than the Barrow culture of southern Britain and Ireland. The Knap of Howar is the best preserved such site, but archaeologists have discovered evidence of clusters of other early stone buildings dating from 3600 to 3100 BCE dotted around the Orkney Isles.9 They were occupied, it seems, by the very people who went on to build Skara Brae and the Stones of Stenness and to begin the Megalithic age.
The big question is, Why did the Orkney Islanders start building stone housing before anyone else in the British Isles? It may have been through necessity. While the islands are now largely treeless, archaeology has shown that until around 5,600 years ago the lower-lying areas were thickly wooded by hazel, birch, and willow trees, the remains of which now exist in peat bogs. However, the use of timber by humans gradually deforested the islands, starting with the smaller ones, such as Papa Westray. With no wood for creating dwellings, homes began to be built from stone. Eventually, trees virtually disappeared from all the islands, so stone buildings replaced the earlier wooden ones throughout the Orkneys.10 When archaeologists first realized this, they were confronted by a mystery. What did the later islanders use for fuel? Recent excavations of Skara Brae and other Grooved Ware settlements on the islands have found evidence that fires were made from dried seaweed. Seaweed was probably also used to make roofs for the buildings. The Orkneys still had a plentiful supply of tough grasses, so straw rope could be made. Until the twentieth century, traditional roofing on the Orkney Isles consisted of ropes attached to stones, over which seaweed was thatched. It’s quite possible that it was the same with the ancient dwellings.11
Those who began the Grooved Ware culture around 5,100 years ago were almost certainly the same people who had been living on the Orkney Isles for centuries. As they primarily made their living from the sea, they had long lived in stable, permanent communities, rather than moving around as nomadic hunter-gatherers. They were already used to living in one place and in larger numbers than most Mesolithic people. Once deforestation forced them to change, it would not have taken much to adapt their lifestyle to live in permanent stone dwellings. And the building of stone dwellings probably led to the construction of stone monuments. The regular quarrying of stone meant that they inadvertently developed the skills necessary to build stone circles. The islanders had gradually learned how to cut, move, and erect ever larger stones. Despite the sophistication of their society, they were still in the Stone Age. It would be centuries before the Bronze Age came to the British Isles. Rock would need to be quarried and shaped with stone, flint, and bone implements. But the natural layers into which the native flagstone was stratified made it comparatively easy. If they had only hard rock, such as granite, to work with, it’s unlikely that the Stones of Stenness would ever have been erected.
This doesn’t explain why the Orkney Islanders built the Stenness stone circle, but it does explain how they were able to erect such a monument before anyone else in the British Isles. Whatever their impetus was, the project would have required a great deal of time and effort by a large number of people working together for a common cause. None of this would have been possible without a relatively large population, a stable society, and a surplus of labor, freed up from the day-to-day tasks of survival. In other words, the Orkney Islanders were prosperous and well fed. There was a steep rise in the general standard of living by the time Skara Brae was built, which was due to the adoption of agriculture to complement an already decent livelihood from the sea. The islanders had long been a boat-building people who made craft from dugout logs and hide-covered canoes from the skins of aquatic mammals, in which they not only fished and hunted seal and walrus but also traded between the islands and the mainland. Farming, in the form of animal husbandry, had reached northern Scotland by around 3500 BCE, and the Orkney Islanders began to copy these innovations, bringing back sheep, pigs, and cattle, which they bred successfully into their own livestock herds. Archaeologists have found the bones of many such animals around such settlements as the Knap of Howar, occurring in increasing numbers over the decades leading up to the period the Stones of Stenness were erected. By the time Skara Brae was built, the Orkney Islanders were already a Neolithic farming society, growing crops such as barley, as ancient seeds have been excavated there and in other contemporary settlements.12 So by 3100 BCE the islanders had added agriculture to their long-established living earned from the sea. Plentiful food led to a rise in population, and the limited area of living space afforded by the Orkneys meant the growth of settlements close by one another. This in turn would have necessitated a degree of cooperation between various settlements that would not be required on the British mainland. Accordingly we have the growth of an island-wide society more advanced than anything else in the British Isles at the time, something strikingly revealed by the way they lived.
Skara Brae consisted of seven clustered dwellings composed of single, rounded rooms measuring an average of 400 square feet. Each was entered through a low doorway sealed with a stone slab that could be slid open and shut. The homes even contained pieces of furniture, such as closets, seats, and storage boxes, all made from stone, as were hearth areas; beds were created by a stone rectangle, which would probably have been filled with straw overlaid by animal hides. An eighth building has no such furnishings but was divided into cubicles and seems to have been used as a workplace for making tools, such as bone needles, stone axes, and flint knives. Amazingly a drainage system was incorporated into the overall design of the settlement, including a toilet in each house in the form of a stone-divided cubicle. It may not seem like much by today’s standards, but compared with anything else in the British Isles at the time, this was the height of luxury.13
Skara Brae is thought to have been home to around fifty individuals at any one time. There were other contemporary villages on the islands, up to twice the size, but none have remained anywhere nearly as well preserved. Just to the north of the Stones of Stenness, on the shores of the Loch of Harry, is one such village. Called the Barnhouse Settlement, it was excavated in the 1980s to reveal that it originally consisted of around fifteen dwellings similar to those at Skara Brae.14 There were probably dozens of such ancient Neolithic villages dotted around Mainland Island, each home to between fifty and one hundred people. The fragmentary remains of some of these settlements have been identified, but it is thought that, as most were built close to shore, many have been lost to the ocean due to rising sea levels and the erosion of the exposed coastline. Some, however, may still await discovery, buried beneath the ground. Today around twenty thousand people inhabit the islands, which is pretty much the same number of people who lived there when records began in 1801. However, it is impossible to tell just how many people lived on the Orkneys five thousand years ago, but it must have been a thriving population, with workers to spare.
By around 3100 BCE the islanders had presumably united as a single society with common aims, as they came together to create the Stenness stone circle. Such an undertaking would have required hundreds of people working in unison—quarrying, moving, and erecting the stones for the monument. Like the rest of the Neolithic British Isles, there is no evidence that the islanders tamed large mammals, such as oxen or ponies, to work as draft animals. No one had invented the yoke or harness, for a start. In fact, the use of animals as beasts o
f burden did not occur anywhere in the British Isles until the Bronze Age, over a thousand years later. So the islanders had to drag the huge stones themselves. They knew how to make rope, so large numbers of people could combine their efforts. But how did they drag stones weighing around 6 tons each? The general consensus concerning the movement of large megalithic stones in later mainland Britain, such as those at Stonehenge, is that they were dragged along on wooden rollers. It wouldn’t need many such rollers, as each would be moved from back to front as the stone rolled forward.15 But were there still enough large trees left on the Orkney Isles for rollers to be made? The same question would apply to the kind of heavy timber A-frames thought to have been used elsewhere in the British Isles to haul the stones into their final upright positions. Although the climate was warmer during the period in question, the far north of Britain would still have been snow covered in winter. It is therefore possible that the islanders actually impacted snow in front of the stones and managed to slide them along somehow. It is also possible that they built ramps from snow in order to raise the stones to be dropped down into their pre-dug holes.
Whatever compelled the Orkney Islanders to build such a monument, the Stenness stone circle is clear evidence that some kind of new thinking had occurred. Archaeology has shown that the people who erected the Stones of Stenness were well fed and lived comfortably. By 3100 BCE their lives were no longer dominated completely by the toil to survive. The islanders—certainly some of them—were enjoying something completely new: leisure time. They had time to think, create, and invent: a state of affairs rife for fresh ideas. The reasoning behind the building of the oldest known stone circle in the British Isles must have emerged from some kind of innovative religious or social concepts that consequently developed. And it’s not only the Stones of Stenness that suggest the emergence of a new culture but also the contemporary change in ceramic style.
As we have seen, around the very time that the Stones of Stenness were erected, grooved ware pottery started to be made on the Orkney Isles. This is surely more than coincidence. Before 3100 BCE the style of pottery found on the islands was what is called unstan ware. Named after a site on Mainland Island where it was first discovered, it is characterized by a rounded design, very different from the angular grooved ware that followed. Unstan ware has been found at the Knap of Howar and at other settlements throughout the Orkney Islands, dating from around 3600 BCE until the appearance of grooved ware some five hundred years later. It has also been found at numerous burial sites across the islands dating from this period, leading to the name Unstan Ware culture being applied to the islanders of this time. They were almost certainly the same people who became the Grooved Ware culture, as both buried their dead in distinctive round tombs not found anywhere else in the British Isles during the period in question. Unstan ware is actually named after one of these earlier such tombs. Called the Unstan Chambered Cairn, it lies two miles to the southwest of the Stenness Stones and is a typical tomb of the period from 3600 to 3100 BCE, consisting of a circular mound built over a central stone chamber, accessed by a long passageway. The shape, construction, and entire layout of these so-called passage tombs are completely different from those of the long barrows and dolmens in southern Britain and Ireland (see chapter 3). At the time, this style of burial mound was unique to the Orkney Isles. Elsewhere, tombs mounds were elongated rather than circular and lacked the low stone tunnels that led to the Orkney burial chambers.16
Fig. 4.2. The Orkney Isles.
Although the Orkney tombs continued to have their unique, round external shape and the long entrance tunnels, the design of the central chamber abruptly changed around 3100 BCE. One of the earliest examples is the Quanterness Cairn on the eastern side of Mainland Island, which dates from that time. Its central chamber is surrounded by side chambers that are not found in earlier tombs. This distinctive change from the tombs of the Unstan period, with a single burial chamber, must have marked the same transformation in thinking that accompanied the emergence of grooved ware pottery and the building of the Stenness stone circle. Excavations at Quanterness in the 1970s uncovered the remains of 157 individuals of all ages, and it is thought that the tomb originally contained around 400 people buried over many generations. These new burial mounds, which continued to be used and built for over five hundred years, have been termed Maeshowe-style tombs, of which seven still survive on the Orkney Isles, although there were no doubt many more that have been lost to the sea. They are named after the best-preserved example, which stands about half a mile to the east of the Stones of Stenness. The Maeshowe mound is 115 feet in diameter and rises to a height of 24 feet. Its low entrance passage is 3 feet high and about 36 feet long, leading to a 12-foot-high square chamber, measuring about 15 feet on each side. Some of the larger stones used to create Maeshowe weigh over 3 tons. The central chamber is constructed of flat stone slabs, many traversing the entire sides of the chamber, with the top part of the walls constructed of overlapping slabs to create a beehive-shaped roof. In each corner is a cleverly designed buttress to support the ceiling, each made from stacked stones, together with a large standing stone about 8 feet high. Three side chambers, or cells, averaging about 6 feet by 5 feet and about 3 feet high, are accessed by 2.5-foot-square entrances, each built halfway along the side and rear walls, some 2.5 feet above the ground. Today, a large stone, thought to have been used to seal them, lies on the floor outside each of these cells.17
Maeshowe has been emptied by a variety of tomb robbers and souvenir hunters over the centuries, including the Vikings, who even left graffiti at the site. Nordic runes (the old Scandinavian alphabet) dating from the twelfth century are found all over the walls of the central chamber. Many tell us who carved them—such names as Vermundr, Thorir, and Haermund Hardaxe—while others include various lewd comments boasting of sexual exploits. Quite contrary to the notion that such places were once used as temples to Odin (see here), the Vikings clearly had no respect for the site. Interestingly, some of this age-old graffiti tells us that treasure was supposedly hidden there; the Vikings probably tore the place apart looking for it. Consequently, little in the way of human remains has survived for modern archaeologists to examine. Although a newspaper article in 1861 reported that two female “mummies” and the skeleton of a man over ten feet tall were found there in that year, few people, even at the time, took the claim seriously.18 Nonetheless, enough has been discovered in recent years, such as shards of grooved ware pottery, to date Maeshowe to being around 5,100 years old. It is an astonishing architectural achievement for its time, and like the other Maeshowe-style tombs, it seems to have been a completely local innovation.
Estimates for the amount of time needed to build Maeshowe vary between forty thousand and one hundred thousand work-hours; either way, it required vast effort and enormous commitment. Of particular interest is that the long, straight entrance passage at Maeshowe is constructed to let the direct light of the setting sun illuminate the central chamber at the winter solstice (the shortest day of the year), around December 21. Undoubtedly, this was more than coincidence. Just like the Stones of Stenness, the structure was seemingly associated with some religious or other formal activity connected with midwinter. It therefore seems likely that the Maeshowe-style mounds were more than just tombs. Some scholars propose that they were used primarily as ceremonial sites, the burials being secondary, in a similar manner to how medieval cathedrals were principally places of worship, although they also contained crypts in which the dead were laid to rest. As the Stones of Stenness appear to have had a king stone aligned to the midwinter sunrise, it’s possible that, on the shortest day of the year, a ceremony took place at the stone circle at dawn and another at Maeshowe at sunset. The two sites are about a mile apart, and an ancient Neolithic track, possibly a processional way, joins them together.
Some extraordinary examples of Neolithic art also accompanied the beginning of this new culture. During excavations at Skara Brae, a number of strang
e stone balls were found. About the size of tennis balls, they are carved with enigmatic grooves and bumps, with one covered in sixty-seven pyramid-shaped protrusions. Another similar object, of the same size but with six equally spaced round knobs, was found during excavations of another Neolithic settlement at the Ness of Brodgar near the Stones of Stenness. Referred to by archaeologists as petrospheres, they don’t seem to have been used as any kind of tool, as they reveal no indication of the sort of wear and tear expected to be found on work implements. Such items, dating from around 3000 BCE onward, have been discovered elsewhere in the British Isles, at sites where grooved ware pottery is also found.19 At present, their purpose remains a mystery, yet another enigma accompanying the birth of the stone-circle-building culture.
In 1981 among the remains of a badly damaged Maeshowe-style passage tomb near Pierowall on the island of Westray to the north of Mainland, a new discovery was made: a megalith, about 4 feet long and broken in two. The first piece was found by workers at a local quarry and the second by archaeologists from Cardiff University who conducted an excavation following the discovery. It was determined that the stone was part of a larger lintel that was once set over the tomb’s entrance. Known as the Westray Stone, it is now on display at the island’s museum at Pierowall. Decorated with a series of double spirals and concentric circles, it dates from around the same time as the Stones of Stenness and is the earliest known example of such ornamentation found anywhere in the British Isles.20 The carvings survived because the stone had remained buried for millennia, but it is thought that similar markings may have adorned the exterior stones of other passage tombs such as Maeshowe but have eroded away in the relentless wind and rain that batter the Orkney Islands.
Wisdomkeepers of Stonehenge Page 7