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The tourist season is upon us. The camper vans are rolling off the ferries, the cruise liners are disgorging thousands of passengers into the streets of Kirkwall, and the bus tours are heading for the World Heritage Sites. And the puffins have emerged again. Not only from their burrows in the cliffs of Marwick Head and Westray, but in every tourist shop in Orkney. In fact, puffins might be said to be one of the signature images of the Orkney tourist industry. Their brightly-coloured clown-like faces are easily recognizable by the most amateur of ornithologists, and lend themselves to small gift objects in every media from postcards to soft toys. There is not a gift shop or tourist attraction in Orkney that isn’t stuffed with images of puffins in one medium or another, to varying standards of artistic competence. For me, puffins rank in aesthetic appeal with those yellow plastic ducks. Give me an atmospheric row of cormorants on a wave-lashed rock any day.

However, I wish the birds themselves no harm. In particular, I have no desire to eat puffins any more than bonxies, although in the past puffins were regarded as food in many places from Ireland to Iceland by island families struggling to get enough food to survive. They are still eaten, fresh or smoked, in Iceland and the Faroe islands, although they are a protected species everywhere else in the world.

I wonder how many of our visitors know that seabirds of many species, including puffins, cormorants, fulmars, kittiwakes, guillemots and eider ducks, were once a very common source of protein. For centuries, the poverty-stricken crofters of Orkney used to lower themselves over the cliffs on the end of straw ropes to gather seabirds and their eggs. There are early photographs showing men doing this. It was a dangerous business, and there were fatalities. The men used nets, nooses, fishing lines and their bare hands. Puffins were taken out of their burrows using hooked sticks or gloved hands (they pecked).

Seabirds were eaten fresh, or salted or smoked for winter. They do not sound very tasty to me. I do not fancy eating something that tastes better if it has been buried in soil for a few days to get rid of the fishy taste. Mind you, I don’t actually like the idea of eating pheasants that have been hung up to go slightly rotten for a week or so either. Some of the eggs and feathers were used by the men’s families; some eggs were sold in local shops. To get really fresh eggs, the men might go over the cliffs, destroy all the eggs in the nests, and then come back a few days later when the birds had laid more. Feathers were traded or sold to merchants from the continent for stuffing pillows and feather beds (“The Northern Isles: Orkney and Shetland”, Alexander Fenton 1978, Chapter 59, pp510 – 23).

I was intrigued to discover that in 18^th century Anglesey, puffins were preserved by pickling. Pickled puffins were not just eaten locally, but barrels of them were sent to be sold in London. And they were considered such a delicacy that one ‘lady of the manor', Elizabeth Morgan, boasted of having a recipe for making pickled pigeons look like puffins (“Portraits of an Island: Eighteenth Century Anglesey”, Helen Ramage 1987, pages 103-4). What a horrible thought!

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.

Giving evening lectures to local interest groups was part of my work as a museum curator. The subject matter was usually interesting enough in itself (Roman toilets), the objects beautiful enough (medieval decorated jugs and illuminated manuscripts), to make it easy to hold the audience’s attention. Well, they only went to sleep on one occasion and the organiser reassured me afterwards that those particular members usually did so. I did get some good tips from my father. He was a microbiologist specialising in rabies vaccines, and he once showed me a slide he used to jazz-up a lecture, which I assume consisted mainly of tables and graphs. It was the front page of a French magazine, a sort of Gallic “Hello” or “OK”, and showed a curvy young female on a beach having her bikini pulled off her behind by a mad dog. The title was “La Rage sur la Plage”.  This inspired me to buy a few stills from the film “One Million Years BC”, with cave men and women fighting dinosaurs, to enhance my next lecture on Stone Age Hertfordshire. They went down a treat.

But the best trick I ever saw was when I was a student and attended a conference on bog bodies. The last speaker of the day was from Scandinavia, an area rich in well-preserved human remains recovered from peat bogs, where the acid soils slow the decomposition of organic material, and preserve such dramatic finds as human skin with wounds, hair and clothing, stomach contents, and other things which you don’t usually find on your average excavation on a redevelopment site in the town centre. The most famous bog bodies all have names, which any archaeology student will know, such as Tollund Man, Lindow Man and so-on. At the end of his lecture, he whipped a small black object out of his trouser pocket, and held it up, announcing “And here in my pocket is the finger of Grauballe Man”.

How cool is that!