The Ness of Brodgar - A Journey Into the Past Part 1

When I was last in Orkney in the Spring of 2011 I visited some of the main archaeological sites including the neolithic village of Skara Bray, Maeshowe one of the finest chambered tombs in north-west Europe and the 5000 plus year old Tomb of the Eagles on South Ronaldsay.

On this trip I returned to the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness and planned my arrival towards the end of the annual excavation of the vast Stone Age complex of the Ness of Brodgar. This year's excavation season ended yesterday 21 August which will leave the site covered in plastic and old tyres until next Summer when the groundwork starts again. I have a great interest in prehistory and have made it my business to visit many sites in a number of countries to view and to experience the ancient remains of a culture we scarcely understand....our Stone Age ancesters. During the course of thinking about and reading about these societies I have been struck by two points in particular. The first is the universality of our primitive forebears, art and science was remarkably 'global' before the settlements coalesced into tribes and nations and eventually nation states and empires. Before those processes took place there is a remarkable symmetry between human cultures all around the world. This is a point I will return to in due course. 

The other and closely related notion I have been struck by is that ancester veneration and worship is a universal feature of the human psyche from our neolithic origins of modernity and very possibly before the neolithic revolution brought us fixed farming communities and settlement on the land. Evidence for the earlier evolution of a cult of the dead is now emerging in Anatolia in southeast Turkey and the world changing discovery of 11,000 year old Göbekli Tepe.

Link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

But this post is not about Gobekli Tepe because what is coming to light there tears up existing archaeological categories and since I want to refer to one of those, namely the late neolithic, I don't want to tear up my map until I can at least see why that has to be done, in the light of emerging understandings about our origins in prehistory.

The Ness of Brodgar

 

During the final weeks of this year's excavations I paid several visits to the Ness of Brodgar archaelogical site. Here is what Wikipedia says about the Ness......

"Ness of Brodgar is an archaeological site covering 2.5 hectares (6.2 acres) between the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness in the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site near Loch of Harray, Orkney, in Scotland. Excavations at the site began in 2003. The site has provided evidence of housing, decorated stone slabs, a massive stone wall with foundations, and a large building described as a Neolithic "cathedral"^[1] or "palace".^[2] The site may have been occupied from as early as 3500 BC to the close of the Neolithic period more than a millennium and a half later. According to project manager Nick Card, the discoveries are unparalleled in British prehistory, the complexity of finds is changing the "whole vision of what the landscape was 5,000 years ago" and that "it’s of a scale that almost relates to the classical period in the Mediterranean with walled enclosure and walled precincts".

Additionally, according to archaeologists in general, the site could be more important than Stonehenge" . Link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ness_of_Brodgar

I went at this time of year to catch the short excavation period (15 July - 21 August) before the site is covered up again for the Winter, but when I say the site I mean what is less than 10 percent of the whole site. Many more secrets are awaiting below the surface of this field between two great bodies of water. The remains of the structures we are seeing here are buildings that rest upon older buildings, different in shape (mostly oval) from the 4.5 thousand year old structures being slowly uncovered here at the final stage of the great settlement that once dominated the area. These older structures existed long before our forebears created their 'cathedral' we are beginning to comprehend the significance of at the Ness of Brodgar. It is impossible of course to know with certainty why these buildings were originally created or what ceremonies may have taken place here. We can make 'educated guesses' but the culture that created them left us no written record and while archaelogy is greatly aided by science, in the end the picture we have is only speculation of what there might have been in this special place. It has been pointed out that the present day isthmus lends itself to a processional route from the Stones of Stenness to the Ring of Brodgar with the Ness of Brodgar in between.   

As mysterious and beguiling as these monumental sites are, it is the passage graves and cairns that speak to us of the ancestors and the role of their veneration in the evolution of human society, culture, science, art and religion.

Prevailing archaelogical wisdom has it that the area is ideally suited for the construction of their ceremonial monuments - a massive natural "cauldron" formed by the hills of the surrounding countryside and therefore bordered by hill, water and sky. This so-called cauldron-like topography can be seen at other neolithic ceremonial sites like the stone circle at Avebury in southern England.

The aerial view below shows the area today, but when the site at the Ness of Brodgar was developed the Stenness sea loch (on the right side of the picture) was not yet there, it is said to have been a bog in those days. The loch and its surrounding area underwent detailed geophysical and multibeam sonar surveys in 2011 and 2012 to investigate the drowned palaeo-landscape. The surveys indicated significant archaeological features in the loch including a circular structure possibly a henge.

Reference Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loch_of_Stenness#cite_note-abdn-9
 

A number of important finds have been made this year including an important piece of geometrically inscribed stone found on 1 August. So far around 450 pieces of inscribed stone have been found at the Ness and also evidence of colouration, some structures at least appear to have been painted with red/orange, black and/or white paint. These same colours have been found at neolithic sites in other parts of the world and they appear to be the earliest colours used by prehistoric painters worldwide.

The Ness of Brodgar was undoubtedly one of the most important sites in Neolithic Britain, some argue it is the most important site bar none. The so called "cathedral" or "temple" or sometimes "palace" is unique as Wikipedia points out:-

"The temple-like structure, which was discovered in 2008, has walls 4 metres (13 ft) thick and the shape and size of the building are visible, with the walls still standing to a height of more 1 metre (3.3 ft). The structure is 25 metres (82 ft) long and 20 metres (66 ft) wide and a standing stone with a hole shaped like an hourglass was incorporated into the walls. There is a cross-shaped inner sanctum and the building was surrounded by a paved outer passage. The archaeological team believe it is the largest structure of its kind anywhere in the north of Britain and that it would have dominated the ritual landscape of the peninsula."
Link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ness_of_Brodgar  

However, Orkney not only holds the secrets of the massive and the ceremonial, the islands also provide insights into the everyday lives of ordinary people during the neolithic period most notably the village of Skara Brae. The settlement at Skara Brae consists of eight clustered houses, and was occupied from roughly 3180 BCE - 2500 BCE. For those who may not be too sure - BCE is the abbreviation for Before the Common/Current/Christian Era - take your pick (an alternative to Before Christ, abbreviated BC) used to date historical events with a slightly less obvious reference to the Christian era.

I have previously posted on Multiply a blog on ancester veneration as the proto-religion from which all subsequent religions have I believe evolved (at  link below).

http://aaranaardvak.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/is-ancestor-worship-origin-of-all.html  

In that earlier post I made the bald statement that:-

It (ancestor veneration) is also fundamentally humanistic, what could be more so than the belief that past human beings are the only legitimate subjects (or objects) of veneration? In that sense ancestor worship at least in the form I am conceptualising it here is the crowning spiritual principle of humanistic atheism.

Every visit to prehistoric sites to me only reinforces those beliefs that humanistic atheism has its precursors in the dawn of human society long before the emergence of all of the world's major religions and global belief systems. However, we do have to be a little bit careful here because ancestor veneration is not necessarilly the same thing as ancester worship. The latter presuposes a supernatural role for the departed whereas the former implies  ways to respect, honor and look after ancestors in their afterlives as well as seek their guidance for their living descendants. The term ancestor veneration does not deify the dead and therefore comes closer to the meaning discussed in my previous post referenced above. It is of course widely known that in ancient China and Egypt, the influence of ancestors was very great. They were buried in expensive graves and in Egypt a permanent death cult was instituted. It was generally believed that the lack of veneration would cause the deceased to die a second death, which was for many people an almost unbearable thought. In preliterate societies such as the neolithic Orcadians it is not possible to know the exact significance of the tombs, cairns and passage graves, but one thing is abundantly clear and that is like their Egyption and Chinese counterparts these burial chambers in Orkney were very expensive in terms of effort and the time taken to construct them.

I will complete this first part of the blog with a bit of raw video footage showing the scale of the archaeological activities at the Ness of Brodgar. As ever the Orcadian wind is muffling what the archaelogist is saying....on Sunday I curtailed the site visit because of gale force winds gusting to 48 miles per hour made it hard to do anything very much, this was taken on Monday 19 August when the wind had dropped a little. It is still difficult to hear what he is saying, but the film gives some idea of what it is like to visit the Ness while the excavation is in full swing.

There is also a nice shot of the person in front's hat for anyone interested in contemporary millinery.

     

In Part 2 we cross the water to visit Rousay sometimes known as Orkney's Egypt of the North because of the great proponderence of ancient monuments there are on that small island a few nautical miles north of Orkney's Mainland.