The early prehistoric rooms in Orkney Museum are on the ground floor of the building, leading off one another. When you have been past a caseful of exquisite polished stone axe heads, whale vertebrae made into bowls, and some of the famous Grooved Ware pottery (Neolithic), you come into another room where steatite burial urns from Bronze Age cists and eagle claws from the famous Tomb of the Eagles catch the eye. But my favourite object in that room is a small flat trapezoidal piece of dull black stone, rather inconspicuously displayed on the top shelf of the showcase in the centre of the room. It is part of a Bronze Age necklace.

I like it because it is an interesting intellectual exercise. It is one of those finds where only a small part of an object has been found, but you can tell what was there originally if you know how to recognize it. I did a lot of that during the years I worked writing reports on medieval pottery, recognizing London Ware pitchers from a small piece of the spout, or St Neots Ware bowls from a fragment of an inturned rim. That’s archaeology. An awful lot of the time you are dealing with small broken pieces of  the original artefact. To display them to the public in a museum case does take a certain amount of creativity.

This little piece of black stone comes from the peat moss at Grind, Tankerness, in the East Mainland of Orkney. That is to say, it was recognized in a peat which had come from that moss, by William Mitchell, who donated it to the Orkney Antiquarian Society. Unfortunately I have not found a record of the date it was found, but since it was published in 1934-5 it must have been found before then ⁽¹⁾.   It is one of  the spacer plates from a Bronze Age multistrand necklace. If you tip it sideways you can see that there were four holes bored through it to hold the strings of the necklace. Its shape was designed to hold the strands in the right position to give the necklace a crescentic outline. It has geometric decoration punched into the flat surface. None of the rest of the necklace was found – imagine trying to find small black beads in black peaty soil –  but the presence of a whole 4-strand necklace can be inferred from this small object. 

It is referred to on the label as jet, which carries the implication that it was imported from Yorkshire, which is the nearest source of jet. William Kirkness, who published it, believed it to be lignite or cannel coal, both of which can be found in Scotland. However without scientific testing, which as far as I know has not been carried out on this piece, it is not possible to distinguish jet from albertite. Albertite was used for jewellery in the Bronze Age in Orkney. There are beads from Skara Brae and Swandro on Rousay, and a V-bored button-shaped object from the Tomb of the Eagles believed to be made of albertite. The Swandro bead material has been confirmed by several different methods of scientific analysis. There is a deposit of albertite at Dingwall, just north of Inverness, and in Orkney on the NE shore of Stronsay there is bed of rock which apparently resembles albertite in composition ⁽²⁾.  So the spacer plate might be jet, but it might be any of these other rocks.

So what did the necklace look like? My drawing is based on a number of complete and partial Bronze Age ‘jet’ spacer-plate necklaces found at various places in Scotland such as Poltalloch, Killy Kiaran and Mount Stewart. The carved design on the Poltalloch necklace is said to have retained traces of a white substance which would have made it stand out more against the black background. They appear to have been worn by women, and the similarity of their shape to gold lunulae has been noted. Most are now in the National Museum of Scotland, and their online collections database has images of some of them.

It reminds us that Orkney was important in the Bronze Age as well as the Neolithic or the Viking age.  Many people don’t know about the existence of the beautiful sheet gold discs from the largest barrow at the Knowes of Trotty, or the remains of an amber necklace from the same grave, because they are in the National Museum in Edinburgh. Perhaps someone could donate some really good replicas to the museum; after all there is a replica of the Tankerness Hood on display in the Iron Age gallery.

1. Kirkness, William  (1934-5) ‘Note on the discovery of a plate from an early Bronze Age necklace', Proc Orkney Antiq Soc, vol. 13, p.41 & Fig.2
2. British Regional Geology: Orkney and Shetland  1976, Natural Environment Research Council; Institute of Geological Sciences, Chapter 8 Old Red Sandstone of Orkney, Page 80