2005 Fieldwork Season
We returned in June 2005 to spend four weeks excavating one of the buildings we’d begun to examine in 2004 – structure 89. The site had been well protected from winter storms, and it took days to remove all the sand and turf we had carefully replaced the year before.
This year’s excavation proved even more interesting than last. Inside the building, we uncovered a central hearth, based on a burnt, heat-fractured limestone slab. Nearby were several smaller fire-spots and fire-pits and we found pieces of worked red deer antler, which suggests that this part of the house was used for some small-scale industrial activity. Our star find from this area was a spindle whorl, which was used to maintain the tension on wool during spinning. Further along inside the house was a beautifully built, circular stone oven, with clay packed between the stones to make it airtight. It had probably had a clay capping, as we found red and green (heat-affected) clay spread over and around it.
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The circular stone oven | Rachel shows off the spindle whorl |
We also removed parts of the south wall, and discovered that it had gone through at least three phases of re-building, with the addition of extra skins of stone and turf to make it stronger and thicker. There was also evidence of an external hearth and an earlier paved entrance. After the walls had been thickened one last time, the entrance was shifted to the east and a curving wall was built to shelter it. Underneath the south wall we found a thick midden deposit, and under that was a pit full of willow charcoal and coarse pottery.
The north side of the building seemed to have been built over just one phase. Here the wall also lay on a thick midden deposit, full of animal and fish bone, charcoal and pottery. Sherds from imported Dutch cooking pots, dating to the 16th century, lay beneath the north wall. These show it was built sometime during (or after) the 1500s.
This ties in well with a radiocarbon date from animal bone, also sealed beneath the wall, which produced a calibrated date of AD 1450 to 1640. Charcoal from the pit beneath the deep midden deposits on the south side produced a calibrated date of AD 1395 to 1470, so we can safely say that activity had begun on the site at least by that point. A linear stone-built feature, including many burnt limestones, lay beneath the midden deposits that were sealed by the north wall. This could be a remnant of an earlier building on the site.
There are other hints of even earlier activity. Some of the pottery from the earlier midden deposits is hand made, with low-fired, grass-tempered, dark fabrics – very similar to pottery from late Norse contexts elsewhere in northern Scotland. Other artefacts, like fishing weights that were re-used in walls and paving, are also typically late Norse in character. The area is rich in Norse place names (including Borralie), and it may be that the people who first came to the site were Norse settlers, or that they used artefacts like those used by the Norse elsewhere, and continued to use them well into the Medieval period.
Excavation of the longhouse underway in 2005
The earlier stonework, including several burnt (white) limestones