January 2021

People have often asked me what was the most exciting object I ever found while working in archaeology. Two finds stand out in my memory and I can’t decide between them, so I will describe both. They could not have been more different. One dated from the Ice Age, the other was medieval. One I uncovered on an excavation, the other in a museum.

The excavation was in south-west France. We were working in the cool shade under the overhang of a limestone cliff. Above us towered the cliff, below us stretched a gentle wooded slope. Saplings had grown across the entrance to the shelter and filtered the sunlight. Fourteen thousand years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, people had lived there, blocking the entrance with a wall and lighting a fire year after year on the same spot to make a snug home for the winter. Now some of us were uncovering the hearth, slowly peeling off the layers of earth and ash, while others were working on the area just outside the living space, where they had thrown their rubbish. Strings weighted with fishing line sinkers hung from a frame across the ceiling, marking the ground below into one metre squares so that we could make records of the horizontal distribution of the finds.  A string triangle at the edge of the working area allowed us to record the depth above sea level of finds and surfaces.

I was working on the rubbish dump. As I gently scraped the earth away, I found two tiny flakes of fine bright yellow stone, each with minute chips removed from the edges to shape it. They were the stone barb and tip of an arrowhead made of yellow jasper. The wood of the arrow had decayed, leaving them lying in the exact position they had been in when they were still attached to it, one lying flat, one on its side.  They were quite beautiful, the fine yellow stone looking like solidified butter. And mine were the first eyes that had seen them, mine the first hand that had touched them, in fourteen thousand years.

But you don’t have to be working on site to make an exciting discovery. Almost equally thrilling was a find I made when I was doing post-excavation work on the pottery from a medieval town. All the potsherds had been washed clean and marked with the code for the site and the layer it had come from. This was done in a shed on site while the excavation was going on. Then it was my job to lay all the pottery out on a huge table and see if any of the broken bits would stick together, before proceeding with the cataloguing. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle, but with half the pieces missing, because for various reasons, we never found all the bits.

One of the medieval pits had produced a number of very large sherds of coarse grey unglazed pottery made locally in the thirteenth century. I fitted them together to produce the best part of two dripping dishes. Dripping dishes were shallow pans that were placed under the roasting spit in front of the fire to catch the fat and juices that dripped out of the meat. Mine were semi-circular in shape, with a straight edge on the side nearest the fire, and a handle on the round edge away from it. Each corner had a lip for pouring off the fat. And the best thing of all was that these two dripping dishes had actual medieval fat still sticking to them, where it had burnt onto the lip and the edge against the fire. Just like the fat burned onto your barbecue or your roasting pan, but seven hundred years old.

The thing I found exciting about both of these finds was not that they were made of gold or silver or had an enormous financial value. It was that they connected me to my fellow human beings, who had made and used them long ago: the hunter from so long ago who chose to make an arrow using a stone which was beautiful as well as functional; and the medieval housewife cooking her chicken or leg of lamb on a spit in front of the fire, basting it from time to time with the juices and fat collected in the dish below it. I could almost smell the roasting meat…

Have you ever heard of the Kirkwall Ba’? It is a form of street rugby traditionally played in Kirkwall on Boxing Day and New Year’s Day. There are two teams: the Uppies (Up the Town, the south end) and the Doonies (Down the Town, the north end). In medieval Kirkwall, the south end of the town, the Laverock, was the preserve of the church and the Bishop of Orkney, while the north end, the Burgh, was the domain of the earl.

The first time I saw the Ba’ was on a New Year’s Day shortly after I came to Orkney.  It was a clear sunny day, with brief showers which came and went. I parked my car near a friend’s house and walked into the town centre.  You don’t want to park too near the scene of the action, or your car may suffer. The shop fronts all had stout wooden bars fixed across them at about waist height. The Ba’ starts at the Merkat Cross (market cross), on the green space in front of St Magnus Cathedral.  The green is raised above the level of the road at about waist height, and as one o’clock approached, people started to gather all around. One man climbed up a tree with his camera. I found myself a good place on the edge of the drop with a lamp-post to hang on to.

Just before one o’clock there was a ripple of excitement among the crowd and the two teams approached. To my left, from the south end of town, the Uppies team came marching towards the Merkat Cross. They looked like a rather large rugby team, tough and determined men dressed in a motley collection of rugby shirts, t-shirts with and without logos of various irrelevant kinds, and heavy boots fixed to their feet with a binding of duck tape. The ends of their jeans were also bound tightly round their ankles with duck tape. Then the Doonies arrived from the north end. There were twice as many of them as the first group – apparently there is no rule about how many men per team. They were dressed the same way, but looked even more ferocious. There also appeared to be no age limit. They included everything from wild hairy men in their twenties to bald and white-haired men who appeared to be about sixty. They looked quite terrifying as they scowled their way towards the opposing team and surrounded them completely, squashing them in hard, everyone facing the Cross waiting for the Ba’ to be thrown in.

The cathedral clock chimed one, and the Ba’, a round football-sized effort stuffed with sawdust, was thrown into the scrum from the Merkat Cross. I hoped no-one got it on their head. I knew how heavy the thing was, as I had helped to pack the museum’s collection of ba’s when they had to go into storage temporarily.

I watched with interest as the action began. It looked like a giant rugby scrum, with a circle of about seventy men pushing like mad into the centre. How any of them could tell where the ba’ was, I do not know. It turned out later that most of the time they didn’t. Some of the ones in the middle had one hand up above their heads for some reason. One tall black-haired young man in a red shirt seemed to be in charge of one of the teams, and was shouting incomprehensible instructions to them. I couldn’t tell which team it was, or who was directing the other side. Apparently both teams had planning meetings beforehand and had agreed on their tactics. From time to time, several men came running round the outside of the scrum from somewhere and joined in from the outside, pushing with mighty efforts. I was later told that the people in the middle of the scrum got so squashed and breathless that they had to move out to the outside from time to time. The spectators, meanwhile, were standing quite close to the players, leaving just a clear space about ten feet wide around the outside of the scrum. Cameras whirred and clicked.

The struggling mass of men didn’t move for about ten minutes. Then all of a sudden there was a lot of shouting from the spectators as well as the players, the crowd parted, and the mass moved across the street and plastered itself against the windows of the shops on the opposite side, or rather, against the crash barrier erected for that purpose. It stayed there for quite some time, while something went on within the interior of the scrum that I couldn’t see. Steam began to rise from the overheated players. A boot was thrown up into the air over the spectators. Then there was another howl and the scrum rolled over to my side of the street. Spectators scattered as it came closer and I lost my perch on the wall, but I could see that the players were climbing up onto the wall to get at things from above.  A player knelt on the grass close to me, clutching his anatomy. Someone gave him a drink of water and he returned to the game. The whole thing hadn’t moved more than twenty yards down the street in half an hour.

I was starting to get cold and nobody seemed to be going anywhere, so I nipped up a side street to a café for a hot chocolate and a visit to the loo. I asked the café staff how long the event was likely to last.  They told me it had lasted until eight o’clock at night on Christmas Day i.e. seven hours. The duration was not fixed, it just lasted until one team had got the ba’ into their goal. The shortest recorded Ba’ was the Men’s Christmas Day Ba’ in 1952, which was over in 4 minutes.  The Uppies’ goal was Mackinson’s Corner, at the junction of New Scapa Road and Main Street where the old town gates were originally situated, but the Doonies had to get it into the harbour, actually into the water.  When I went back outside, progress had been made. The Doonies had forced the scrum to the corner of a street leading towards the harbour, and over the next quarter of an hour managed to push the thing halfway down the street. Then somehow it got into a walled car park and stuck there. There were spectators and players climbing the walls, and I could see things were starting to get rough. The locals all say that scores get settled during the ba’. Players seemed to come and go, dropping out for a pee or a drink as needed and then joining in again.

At about two o’clock I left them to it and went home. It appears that I made the right decision. According to the local newspaper, the scrum remained in that car park for three hours.  Water was passed to the players as they pushed and shoved and several players had to be pulled out for first aid before rejoining the scrum. However, around five o’clock the outnumbered but fiendishly cunning Uppies staged a series of dummy runs in which they pretended to get the ba’ out of the scrum and run away with it, totally confusing the players and the spectators, who scattered in various directions. Meanwhile a small group of Uppies quietly walked the ba’ most of the way to their own goal before they were spotted. This is apparently known as a “smuggle”. The Doonies did their best to make a come-back, but the Uppies banged the ba’ off the wall at Mackinson’s Corner a few minutes later, thus winning the game. There then followed twenty minutes discussion over which member of the Uppies team deserved to be declared the personal winner and get to take the ba’ home. The honour was finally awarded to a thirty-nine-year-old airport firefighter who had been playing since he was six years old. According to the paper, the triumphant Uppies then went to the pub, and later to the hero’s home and spent the night in celebration, leaving the streets littered with a scattering of drinks cans and bottles, a couple of boots and a belt, and what looked like a torn t-shirt lying in the road.  

This year, alas, there was no Ba’ because of the covid pandemic. After nine years residence in Orkney, it seemed weird to walk around Kirkwall in the run-up to Christmas and see no boards over the windows. Hopefully, it’ll be back next year.