Archaeology

When I was a young woman, the systematic study of Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) stone tools was just taking off. At that point, experiments to replicate the objects found on excavations were crucial in distinguishing deliberately-shaped tools from natural objects which just looked as if they ought to be tools. My fellow students and I were encouraged to practice flint-knapping and we were allowed part of the college basement for practising our knapping. There were a lot of cut fingers and rude words, and I don’t like to think about the amount of silica dust we probably inhaled, but we did learn how just one small flake could tell you a lot about the tools the Stone Age people were making.

Like the prehistoric tool-makers we were trying to understand, we didn’t only use the flint found in the chalk of southeast England and across the Channel. You can use any rock or man-made substance that is fine-grained and fractures equally in all directions. I have tried glass (highly dangerous, the fine splinters go everywhere); porcelain insulators from electricity cables (works very well); Greek obsidian (lovely) and red chert, also from Greece (good but a little tough). I have a row of rocks on my mantelpiece dating from various parts of my life, which includes pieces I have knapped, or pieces knapped by others more expert than myself.

One of the most interesting pieces on my mantelpiece is a small flake of silicified sandstone. It is a handaxe trimming flake (the handaxe was a modern replica) and it has a characteristic thin, slightly curved shape. If you find these at a site, they show that someone was making the tools often referred to as “handaxes” (bifaces), even if you don’t find any handaxes. “Handaxes” are large bifacial tools which are given their final flat shape by removing a series of these very thin flakes with a bar of bone or antler. They are extremely difficult for a beginner to make, although I have seen an expert polish one off in about two minutes. I stood amazed as he did it – it usually took me half an hour to make a rather clumsy replica, and I had to plan every blow of my hammerstone. He didn’t even look, just kept chatting to us as he worked.

Making stone tools ourselves taught us not only how to classify the tools we were digging up more accurately, but also that sometimes you can infer the presence of a particular kind of Stone Age tool from the shape of the waste produced during its manufacture, even if the tool itself wasn't there. What you have found can tell you about what you haven’t found.

**Drawing of handaxe is from “Man the Primeval Savage”, Worthington G Smith 1894 fig. 151

What a popular subject the Tudors are all over Britain! Henry VIII, Bloody Mary, Elizabeth I – there seem to be just as many books about them in Waterstones in Edinburgh as in Waterstones in London. Not many people realise that we had members of the family in Orkney as well.

James V of Scotland was the nephew of Henry VIII of England. His mother was Henry’s sister, Margaret Tudor.  So genetically he was half-Tudor himself. James appears to have closely resembled his uncle in that he was a great man for the ladies, but unlike Henry, he was fertile, and managed to father not one but nine known illegitimate children by different noblewomen of his court, as well as his legitimate daughter and heir, Mary Queen of Scots. One of James’ natural children ended up in Orkney.

Robert Stewart (1533 – 1593) was the illegitimate son of James V and Euphemia Elphinstone, who had a brief fling with the king before going on to marry someone else. There is very little evidence about his youth and education, but it seems that after he left the nursery he was educated as a nobleman with several of his illegitimate half-brothers in St Andrews. All of James’ bastard sons were taken care of, usually by having them educated and given the revenues of various abbeys and priories as ‘commendators’. Commendators were laymen in charge of the administration of an abbey, who during the 16^th century increasingly took over the direction of these abbeys from the abbots themselves. Robert Stewart was made commendator of Holyrood Abbey in 1539 – i.e. when he was six years old. Hmmm… It must be supposed that he couldn’t have done anything to earn his money at that age.

His father died when he was nine years old, and his infant half-sister became queen. After a few years in France in his teens, completing his education, he returned to the Scottish court and took up the life of a minor noble. He seems to have made himself rather unpopular from the start.

Robert’s official connection with Orkney began in 1564, when his half-sister, Mary Queen of Scots, made him sheriff of Orkney (the role was taken away from him shortly afterwards), and granted him lands in the islands. At this point he was not an earl, just plain Sir Robert Stewart of Strathdon. He arrived in Orkney for the first time in 1567, after his half-sister had lost her throne. He now took back the sheriff’s role, and seized both Kirkwall Castle and Noltland Castle on Westray. He consolidated his Orkney landholdings in 1568, when he forced the bishop of Orkney to exchange his estates in Orkney for the commendatorship of Holyrood.

This included the land in Birsay in West Mainland where Sir Robert built the ‘Earl’s Palace’ between 1569 and 1574. It lies close to the sea in Birsay village.  It had two storeys and was built around four sides of a central courtyard with a well. The kitchen and other domestic facilities were on the ground floor, while the bedrooms and great hall were upstairs. Although the upper storey had large windows, the ground floor had small ones and holes to fire muskets through, and there were three towers, so it was clearly built for defence as well as a palace for a Renaissance prince.

There is a 17^th century line drawing (see “Orkney A Historical Guide” Caroline Wickham-Jones 2015, page 162 figure 55, referenced The Stationary Office) with a plan of the palace, showing all the proper facilities for a nobleman’s residence of the time: walled flower, herb, kitchen and plant gardens on the east side of the palace buildings, as well as a bowling green, archery butts, rabbit warrens and a deer park to the north.

I wish there was more information about the gardens, especially the flower garden or pleasaunce. Earl Robert was following in the footsteps of his father, James V, and his grandfather, James IV, who embellished their palaces at Holyrood and Stirling Castle with formal gardens. Measured from the copy of the 17^th century plan given in Wickham-Jones, the flower garden appears to be approximately 50 feet by 35 feet, i.e. 0.04 acres, i.e. quite small.   Since it was walled, there were probably trees, as there are today in the walled gardens attached to Orkney gentry houses or in towns wherever there is shelter from the wind. Maybe it had gravelled walks, flower beds in geometric patterns, a stone sculpture or two, maybe a sundial and a fishpond, perhaps an arbour draped with honeysuckle or roses over a seat. One can imagine the earl, dressed in silk and velvet with gold embroidery, leaning against a tree sniffing at a flower, à la Nicholas Hilliard. Or exercising with a game of bowls or practicing his archery. Very suitable exercise for a semi-royal prince – both his sister Mary and his cousin Elizabeth enjoyed bowls and archery.

Sir Robert was a married man, with nearly 20 children. In 1561 he had married Lady Jean Kennedy, the daughter of the Earl of Cassilis. Contemporary comment was that he was really in love with her, and they had nine children. However, his wife never came to Orkney, preferring to stay in the centre of civilisation in Edinburgh, which didn’t please Robert at all. Following in the tradition of his royal father and great-uncle, he is also said to have had at least ten children out of wedlock.

Uncle Robert went on to ingratiate himself with his nephew James VI, who reinstated the earldom of Orkney for him in 1581, and also made him Lord of Shetland. He is therefore usually referred to as Earl Robert Stewart. However he later fell out with him. Earl Robert had several terms of imprisonment, on charges of treason and misuse of power, but he managed to duck out of them.  He had a bad reputation for untrustworthiness, land-grabbing, and mistreating the islanders. But he died peacefully in his bed in 1593. The earldom of Orkney was forfeited in 1614 when Robert’s son Earl Patrick, who built the even bigger and better Earl’s Palace in Kirkwall and was even more unpopular, overreached himself and was executed for treason.

By the mid-17^th century Earl Robert’s castle in Birsay had fallen into disrepair. The ruins still stand and are well worth a visit.

Until recently, I had never heard of the Knowe of Moan, in West Mainland, Orkney. I was searching for something else online when an image of what had once been a rather beautiful gilded bronze mount popped up on my screen. It was labelled as coming from the Knowe of Moan. I liked it so much that I decided to make a drawing reconstruction of what it probably looked like before it lost most of its gilding and the insets dropped out. I enjoy doing that kind of drawing.

Further research (mostly online) revealed that in fact that particular mount did not come from the Knowe of Moan. According to a 2021 National Museum publication by Adrián Maldonado (“Crucible of Nations: Scotland from Viking Age to Medieval Kingdom”), it is unprovenanced, so it might not even have come from Orkney. But it is a rather attractive object. However there are a handful of other interesting objects from Moan, including a different mount or brooch. These finds do not come from an excavation where standard records were kept and deposited in a proper archive, nor was there a museum or university department in Orkney where people could report stray finds they had made and be asked relevant questions about the find at the time. They were made in the late 19^th century, before archaeology was an established profession but a time when scholarly gentlemen were starting to take an interest in finds from the past. So the records of who found what at Moan, when they found it, and exactly where they found it, are a bit confusing.

There are some facts which appear to be generally agreed, and others which are not.

1. Most sources agree that in 1886, a farmer called George Flett ploughed up a small stone cist on a hillock called the Knowe of Moan, in the parish of Harray on mainland Orkney. The hillock may originally have been a Bronze Age burial mound or barrow. Mr Flett had knocked the lid of the cist off, and squashed open the ends and sides, pushing them away from the filling of fine black earth.
2. Finds were collected at the site by Mr Flett himself and some local children over a short period of time.
3. They consisted of beads , a small cruciform metal object, a bronze spoon, 3 small bronze fragments, a small piece of slag, a piece of flint (which isn’t native to the area), and a white pebble.
4. Some of the beads were found inside the cist, some outside, and the other objects were all found outside. Whether they were ever inside is a matter of debate.
5. It is further agreed that no human remains, cremated or otherwise, were found. Whether this is because there weren’t any, or because an acid soil had destroyed them, or because the farmer and children didn’t notice little scattered pieces of burnt bone, is impossible to say for certain.
6. Mr Flett gave the finds to a friend of the antiquarian James Cursiter, authorising the friend to pass them on to Cursiter, who was making a collection of archaeological finds from the county.  Cursiter published them as part of a report in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1887(Notice of the Bronze Weapons of Orkney and Shetland, and of an Iron Age deposit found in a Cist at Moan, Harray’ PSAS 21, pp339-46).
7. These finds are now in the Hunterian Museum, with the rest of James Cursiter’s collection. The beads are really beautiful, and the metal object is also quite attractive. If you go to their collections website there are some good images of some of the beads.

From this point onwards, there are disagreements in the various accounts that I have found so far.

1. Some people consider that the cist was probably the cremation burial of a female Viking, and there were originally human remains that have not been recovered. Others consider that the deposit was a hoard, and cite other examples of Viking bead hoards.
2. The beads are stated to be made of glass and amber in most sources, but in the original 1887 publication Cursiter mentions only glass beads. The amber is said to come from the Baltic.
3. The number of beads varies from 55 in the 1887 report to 62-64 in later reports.
4. The cruciform metal object is variously described as a mount or a brooch or a mount recycled into a brooch. It is believed to originate in Ireland and is 9^th century.
5. And according to two separate exceedingly respectable websites, everything at Moan is Bronze Age!

Sorting all these contradictory accounts out is a fine way to spend a wet afternoon, as was drawing what I think the mount/brooches must have looked like originally. I should love to see the original objects one day.

“But I was now escaped out of the shadow of the Roman empire, under whose toppling monuments we were all cradled, whose laws and letters are on every hand of us, constraining and preventing.  I was now to see what men might be whose fathers had never studied Virgil, had never been conquered by Caesar, and never been ruled by the wisdom of Gaius or Papinian.“  Robert Louis Stevenson, “In the South Seas”, Chapter 1

Thus wrote the 19^th century author of ‘Treasure island’ in his account of his arrival in the south Pacific islands where he spent the last years of his life. It is something I have found myself thinking about recently. For much of my life, I lived and worked in an area (Hertfordshire) which had been under the control of Rome for four centuries after 43CE. I studied Latin at school there. I started in archaeology there. Travels in England and the continent introduced me to the rediscovery of Greece and Rome during the Renaissance. When in later life I visited Rome itself and stood among the ruins of the Forum, it was like coming home. I almost expected to see Horace or Pliny walking across the street. To me, having the Romans around was the natural order of things. But like Stevenson, I have come to realise how much living in the area of the former Roman Empire has conditioned my thinking.

Years ago, a letter from a fellow student at university who had gone on to become a museum curator in his native Pakistan, introduced me to the idea that there were Roman finds in the Indian subcontinent. During the early 1^st century CE the Romans learned to use the monsoon winds in summer to sail to what is now India and Pakistan, and the reverse winds in winter to bring them back. They imported luxury goods, such as spices and aromatics, especially various forms of pepper. They went crazy for pearls and Chinese silk. Exotic animals for the arena such as lions and tigers were another sought-after commodity in Rome. The Indians wanted, among many other things, gold coins, not as coinage but for the metal itself, and were keen on the bright red forms of coral that the Romans could supply. They also liked wine, transported in amphorae, glassware and high quality pottery. I found it interesting, as I wandered past the showcases full of stacks of Samian tableware in the Verulamium museum, to think of similar stacks somewhere on the other side of the Indian Ocean. Strangely enough, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, a pioneering archaeologist of the years between the two world wars, who excavated at the Roman town of Verulamium and founded the museum where I worked for many years, was Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India in the 1940s. He worked at the South Indian town of Arikamedu, which produced many finds representing the trade with Rome, lamps, glassware, glass and stone beads, gems and pottery.

I am currently living outside the frontiers of the Roman empire. It is easy to forget that even in the British Isles there were areas where the Romans never penetrated. The far north of Scotland is one of them. Southern Scotland was controlled by the Roman army for short periods several times: under Agricola between 77 and 85 CE, again under Antoninus Pius between 142CE and c.165CE, and under Severus between 208 and 211CE. During Agricola’s campaign Roman military constructions were built as far north as Moray and Aberdeenshire. The Antonine Wall was built in the early 140s CE and ran for 60km, from the Firth of Clyde north-west of Glasgow, to the Firth of Forth north-west of Edinburgh. It only lasted for about 20 years, and as it was made of turf on a stone foundation, there isn’t much of it left for viewing. This bit is in a Glasgow cemetery.

Orkney, where I live now, does not have a single Roman monument, nor is there any evidence that the Romans ever set foot here. They certainly knew it was there, from at least the time around Claudius’ invasion of southern England in 43CE, and they knew that it was an archipelago with many islands. Agricola’s fleet sailed round it in 80CE according to Tacitus. There are some extremely vague and unlikely claims by poets and a 4^th century historian that it became part of the empire, but that is all.  During the 1^st to the early 5^th centuries CE, the period when England and Wales were part of the empire, the people of Orkney were non-literate, prehistoric farmers, often living in or next to brochs, circular stone tower-like buildings with small clusters of houses around them. They had to wait until the Norse settlers in the 11th century for their first towns.

But sometimes Roman artefacts are found in Orkney, usually at broch sites. They are the sort of objects, few in number, which were likely to have been passed from person to person as occasional gifts or curiosities, rather than part of a regular trade in olive oil or high-quality tableware, as happened in the south of England. Things like the broken neck of an amphora which once held foodstuffs like olives or wine; fragments of Samian ware; a glass cup in a burial; a bronze patera (handled dish); glass beads; and small groups of coins. They mostly date from the late 1^st and the 2^nd centuries CE, the period when the Romans penetrated farthest north in Scotland.  My favourite object is the exquisite carnelian intaglio from the broch at Howe, a gemstone carved with the figure of an eagle, which would have been set in a ring. You can see this in the Orkney Museum in Kirkwall.

I also like the fragment of a Samian mortarium (Dragendorf 45) with a lion-head spout from Oxtro broch. It is now in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, but unfortunately their catalogue does not seem to have an image. There are also some objects which were probably not of Roman manufacture but were influenced by Roman design: tweezers, a sandstone lamp, and my third favourite object, a brooch in the form of an insect with outspread wings, made of tinned bronze and found at Howe broch, Stromness. This is also on display in Orkney Museum, along with several other Roman objects.

What the Iron Age inhabitants of Orkney had heard about the Romans, and what the Romans believed about them, apart from them being unfortunate barbarians who didn’t have the advantage of being civilised, we will probably never know. But I myself have had to look at history from a different perspective.

Many thanks to Orkney Museum, Kirkwall, for allowing me to use the two images from their collection

M

I have finally, alas, had to say goodbye to my entertaining job as a tour guide at the Tomb of the Eagles, closed permanently because of the Covid pandemic. It was such fun: not only was I working with a group of really nice colleagues in a beautiful piece of countryside but I was actually being paid to talk for hours about my favourite subject to a captive audience (well, they could have walked out if they were bored). It was sad to say goodbye to the familiar artefacts – the beautifully crafted stone mace head, the terrible pottery (I could do better myself), and especially to the three skulls we used to hold up and explain to the public, ‘Jock Tamsin’, ‘Granny’ and ‘Charlie Girl’. They had almost come to seem like friends.

This gave rise to a curious thought. For 53 years I have been “playing with my forefathers’ joints”, as it were (William Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet” Act IV Scene III). I dug up my first skeleton in a Roman graveyard at the age of 17, closely followed a few months later by an Iron Age chieftain’s cremated bones. The skeleton was a bit of a disappointment, as it was the only one in the cemetery that had any grave goods, and since I was a relative beginner they took it away from me and got someone else to finish digging it. The chieftain I principally remember because it was the depths of winter and we all had to kneel on ice-cold chalk around a circular hole containing the bones and goodies, passing a golfer's hand-warmer round to unfreeze our numb fingers.

When I went to work at the museum in St Albans, I was greeted every morning by our three Roman skeletons, displayed in their coffins in the “Death and Burial” section with their grave goods on shelves around them. They were part of my life for decades and they, too, came to seem like friends. They were later joined by the amazing grave goods from a pair of Romano British graves discovered a few miles away. One contained what would normally be considered female grave goods and the other what would normally be considered male ones. Unfortunately, the bones had been cremated, which makes it difficult, although not always impossible, to identify the sex. Very few of the fragments from the “male” grave had been recovered, which made it even more difficult. There was considerable academic argument as to whether the “male” was a male or a warlike liberated Celtic female. Oh dear…

There were many boxes of human bones behind the scenes in the museum stores, since there had been many excavations on graveyards, Roman and medieval, in and around the town, and we were responsible for storing the lot. Those presumed to be Christian had to be given a Christian reburial after study; we had an arrangement with a local vicar (I hasten to add that all human skeletons were treated with respect.) One of our staff had a special interest in human bone and used to give lovely talks, illustrated with examples of pathological specimens. He was particularly keen on leprosy and syphilis, but my favourite was a medieval skull with a large slice taken out across the top, which was considered to be the result of a sword cut by a mounted soldier cutting downwards at someone on foot, possibly during the Wars of the Roses. We did have two battles in the streets of the medieval town.

As for their teeth, from the Neolithic to the early modern period, before and after the availability of lots of sugar, I have seen things in ancient jawbones that would make your toes curl. Like Granny, the old lady from the Tomb of the Eagles, who had half the roof of her mouth eaten away. NEVER miss your appointment with your dentist, and be thankful that we now have anaesthetics and antibiotics. Be very thankful.

Those of our bones and our bags of crunchy cremations which came from relatively recent excavations were carefully stored in standard boxes on the shelves of roller racking in a store with proper security and environmental controls. On one occasion, however, we did discover a forgotten cache of bones from an early excavation, stored in a basement below the next-door public toilet and forgotten about for decades. They were infested with dry rot and had to be decontaminated by one unfortunate member of staff, garbed in special protective clothing.

Not so dry bones.