Even when on their summer holidays our staff still surround themselves in archaeology. Assistant Archives officer, Del, spent two weeks in Orkney at the famed Ness of Brodgar site. Here is his recollection of what seemed like a truly memorable trip:
‘As someone with a keen interest in prehistoric archaeology, I have been looking enviously at the excavations on the Ness of Brodgar for many years, but not had the time or the means to take part before this year. The site is a complex of Neolithic stone buildings on a strip of land that separates the Loch of Harray and the Loch of Sternness, on the West side of the Orkney Mainland, and is part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site. It has been the subject of several TV documentaries, the most recent being BBC 2’s Britain’s Ancient Capital: Secrets of Orkney, which highlighted the importance of this site to Neolithic Britain centuries before Stonehenge was built.
As I was arriving for the last 2 weeks of the dig, I didn’t have high hopes of doing too much excavation but expected to be mostly backfilling and helping to close the site down for the winter, and this was certainly the case for my final week. However, the first week I was on site I was tasked with tidying up and levelling off a section in the southwest corner of the main trench ready for the trench to be closed down. We were under strict orders not to find anything, which is a dangerous instruction to give an archaeologist. Almost immediately, I found my first ever piece of Neolithic Grooved Ware pottery. This was just the beginning of several finds of such pottery over the next few days, including a flattened and quite degraded pot that I had to lift out on a sheet of metal, a delicate operation that I executed with a skill that surprised myself and the trench supervisor. There was also a surprising amount of worked flint.
Away from the dig, I managed to find time to visit many of Orkney’s other iconic sites: The Stones of Stenness and Ring of Brodgar (situated either end of the peninsula on which we were excavating; Skara Brae and Barnhouse Neolithic villages; and Maeshowe chambered cairn. I met archaeologists from all over the world (including some fellow and former Sheffield students – what a small world archaeology is) and made many new friends from Germany, Spain, the USA, Canada and Ireland.
It is my earnest hope to return next summer, albeit earlier in the season, having fallen in love with Orkney, its inhabitants and its archaeology (& its whiskey).’