Coldrum wrote on 1st October 2009:
Racing against time to save prehistoric Orkney treasures
A desolate site is giving up its archaeological secrets – but the wind is tearing it apart.
She may have been a deity, a fertility symbol, a shaman's prop or perhaps a votive offering. She is at least 5,000 years old, so no one really knows. But the discovery of the tiny sandstone figurine, buried in the rubble of a recently discovered neolithic house on Orkney, has electrified archaeologists.
She is of astonishing rarity and significance. Flat-faced and heavy-browed, with two rounded breasts carefully etched high on her chest, the diminutive figure is one of the oldest representations of a human yet found in Britain. Only two of similar antiquity have been unearthed, and its discovery has transformed the significance of a relatively little-known archaeological dig at the Links of Noltland on the island of Westray on the northern fringes of the Orkney islands.
This desolate site is emerging as one of the UK's most important prehistoric digs: over the last 30 years archaeologists have uncovered a complex of neolithic and bronze age houses, field systems, rich middens and possibly ceremonial buildings dating to 3,500BC.
Even before this prehistoric figure emerged, Noltland had revealed tantalising glimpses of this slowly evolving society: they kept red deer, primitive rough-haired sheep, pigs and cattle; harvested shellfish; planted wheat nourished with domestic waste and animal dung; used whalebone for rafters, tools and clothing pins; made beads; and embellished their tools with carvings and lumps of the ochre-coloured haematite imported from nearby Hoy.
Much of the site is contemporaneous with Orkney's most famous archaeological site, the neolithic village of Skara Brae on the west coast of its main island, which was laid bare, after more than 5,000 years of anonymity, by tremendous storms in 1850 and 1925.
And the wind here is another powerful parallel with Skara Brae. Over the last 30 years, the north Atlantic wind has remorselessly swept away thousands of tonnes of sand at Noltland, excavating dunes and finally exposing several thousand years of early human civilisation.But the wind now threatens to destroy the site, which sits just tens of metres from the surf. The gales are becoming more intense. It is a crisis increasingly common for coastline archaeological sites around Britain.
Since the early 1980s, the land surface at Noltland has dropped by up to 10m (33ft), leaving behind a faintly eerie landscape of isolated, steep-sided dunes topped by rough marram grass and rock- and shell-strewn sand. These tall ramparts have been sculpted by the wind and pockmarked by rabbit warrens, another cause of the site's rapid erosion. It has exposed what now appears to be a significant neolithic township. There are at least five neolithic houses and six later bronze age buildings on Noltland, and evidence of several others are emerging from under the sand.
The dig is being led by Hazel Moore and Graeme Wilson, a wife and husband team hired by the site's owners, the government agency Historic Scotland. They have worked on Noltland for 10 years and have watched, with mounting anxiety, as the wind has stripped the site. "It's pretty disastrous," says Moore. "It's just all going; I don't think there's anything we can do to stop it either. This is why we're here. Everything is being stripped away – it's being exposed and washed out."
One night, a gale sandblasted the paint off the steel container that doubles as the site office. Yet the weather is providing the couple with an unparalleled opportunity, Moore points out. Even against the backdrop of Orkney's rich archaeological history Noltland is proving hugely significant. "This site is going to be key in understanding not just here, but what was happening throughout Scotland," she says. It suggests "quite an assertive, bold society really . . . a flowering of Orkney's settlement by humans".
The islands were inhabited, like much of western Scotland's coastline and all its island groups, because Britain's sheltered coastal waters acted as prehistory's motorways: inland were steep mountains, unfordable rivers, thick forests and wolves. In a world without roads and railways, the Hebridean islands, the Orkney archipelago and Shetlands offered accessible and abundant sources of shelter and food.
The team is currently working on one of the most significant buildings on the site, a neolithic structure 22x21m (72x69ft). Formed with three concentric walls, the building – probably a home – seems to be square with rounded edges, complete with alcoves and a passage.
Advance scans by a geophysics survey team have shown that the walls survive to a height of 80cm (31in), and the task now is to uncover the structure. In its current state, it takes experience and imagination to pick out its original shape. Tonnes of loose sandstone slabs and blocks have collapsed in on the now-roofless building, smothering the original walls, doors, cupboards and hearths.
"It would have been quite impressive but whether it's a powerful individual or a communal building, like a tribal longhouse, we don't know," Wilson explains. "Given that the whole thing is major and 'show-offy', the actual living space inside is quite small."
After it was abandoned, this building was covered by a vast midden or rubbish dump. But this rich mixture of organic waste, earth and rubbish reveals a wealth of artefacts – including the figurine found earlier this month. The quality of these remains is "exceptional", says Moore, because the sandy earth has preserved them far better than acid soils on the mainland.
Inside the site hut are trays piled with finds. Some hold shards of pottery, others fragments of animal bone, horns, shell and crude stone tools. The latest midden has revealed human remains, including a child's milk tooth. "We've found human skull fragments which seem to be actually built into the structure of the wall, which seems to be pretty unusual and interesting," says Wilson. They also recently made an equally puzzling discovery: at least 10 cattle skulls were inserted in the earth packed within the walls, their horns pointing downwards.
Nearby are other, previously excavated neolithic and bronze age buildings now covered by protective sheeting. The steadily eroding sand allows glimpses of their walls. If Historic Scotland can find the funds, they could be reopened for public exhibition.
Photographs taken by Moore and Wilson before they covered the structures are beguiling: in one of the largest buildings, compact, slightly claustrophobic, interlinking rooms curve off within a tear-shaped structure, with alcoves that may have worked as primitive dressers, inset shelves and hearth stones.
The images also explain why Historic Scotland is so nervous. In some buildings, the soft sandstone used by these settlers is deteriorating. In other sections, the stone walls are fractured by subsidence. So parts of these walls are being held by metal clamps, while wooden wedges and sandbags have been inserted into others.
For an enthusiast, the comparisons with Skara Brae are irresistible. Skara Brae is now a perfectly preserved exhibit. It has a visitors' centre, neatly trimmed grass, interpretation boards and protective glass canopies in order to preserve it, but the visitor experience is faintly antiseptic. Noltland is archaeology in the raw. Here you can walk unhindered through the discarded remains of prehistoric meals. The wind has exposed drifts of neolithic and bronze age litter: large areas are strewn with limpet and cockle shells, rabbit bones and sharp-edged shards of stone, chipped off as rudimentary skinning implements.
One test pit established that this had been a heavily cultivated area for several millennia. In some areas, even gouging your heel through the thin veneer of sand exposes dark earth of an ancient midden underneath. Soil scientists are now studying this residue closely. "That's why this site is so important, because the neolithic soils are surviving," says Moore. "Even then, it was a shifting landscape and the settlers were trying to stabilise it; doing things like adding domestic waste, turf – then they got swamped and they tried again."
This is a live site, she adds, "the real thing, and it's eroding in front of us. It's a rescue situation. If you're lucky enough to come up here and see it, it's a very rare opportunity. It's so short-lived and it's not going to survive."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/aug/28/orkney-archaeological-site
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