This is an essay which I wrote as part of my Comparative Civilizations 12 self-designed curriculum.

Observations of the Silent:
Investigating Neolithic Orkney

History is often studied through writings, but what happens when there are no writings to study? When the written word is lacking or is disputable, only one thing remains reliable: solid, physical evidence. While there is no written record of Neolithic Orkney, it is one place where there is a treasure-trove of evidence. On the main island of the Orkney archipelago, bordering the North Sea off the north coast of Scotland, there survive to this day examples of virtually every manner of Neolithic architecture to be found in Europe: stone circles, earthworks, stone chambers, standing stones, and the finest examples of Neolithic domestic residences to be found anywhere. Through the clues left by these extraordinary pieces of evidence we can derive a remarkable amount of information about the lifestyle, social structure, and beliefs of those who built and used them.
Under a sand hill known as Skara Brae, on the edge of the Bay of Skaill (1) on the main island of the Orkney group was found the most perfectly intact Neolithic settlement ever discovered. It was uncovered when a windstorm tore away the covering sand in 1850 A.D., and was excavated by Professor Vere Gordon Childe in the late 1920’s. Although Childe initially dated the site at c. 500 B.C., pottery comparisons conducted in 1939 by one Stuart Piggott showed that it must be older. When the site was finally radio-carbon dated in the 1970’s it was concluded that the site was within the range of 3100 to 2480 B.C., placing its occupation well within the European Neolithic (2).
The first most striking thing to note about the village of Skara Brae is its compact nature. Composed of at least ten distinguished buildings, each unified in size between 4.6 and 6.4 meters across (3), the village is entirely interconnected by a single tunnel. The structures are, and always were, semi-subterranean in the interest of shelter from the harsh Orcadian elements. The village was in fact built into a previous settlement of a similar nature, which had been abandoned at an earlier time and religiously filled in with midden. The stonework of the surviving settlement is notably skillful, using large slabs of stone carefully fit and arranged tightly together so that the ceiling curves to form a structure close to a dome. In such a small community, melded so closely together, there is no evidence of any form of hierarchy. Unless the settlement itself was a ‘palatial structure’, as historian Euan MacKie has put forth (2), the people who lived in Neolithic Orkney knew of no discrimination of social status. There is also absolutely no distinguished evidence to dictate that Skara Brae was such a palace, and the presence of a workshop, basins for the keeping of fishing bait, and the equality in size and intimacy in layout of the dwellings would indicate that the settlement was a simple village of work-a-day folk with little need for social structure. Indeed, with such a small population – Skara Brae could have housed a maximum of nine moderately sized families – a fixed elite would be neither sustainable or logical. The village would most probably be governed by the whole and must have been very co-operative judging by the layout of their settlement and the immensity of the projects that they engaged in.
While there may have been little or no class identification, was there any manner of gender inequality? Wood being scarce in the Orkneys, the people of Skara Brae furnished their dwellings with stone, including bed boxes which have lasted to this day. It has been noted that beds found on the left side of the houses tend to be somewhat smaller than those on the right, and that beads have been found in the beds on the left while being absent from those on the right (3). This has been deciphered to signify that women slept on the left side of the house in beds which were smaller than those of the men, and were therefore held in lower regard. This, however, is only one way of reading this evidence: it is possible that the beds on the left were occupied by children or individuals while the ones on the right were reserved for adult couples, causing it to make sense that those on the right should be larger. Perhaps beads were only worn by children or unmarried individuals in Orcadian society. It is difficult to come to a definite conclusion to a question such as this based solely upon the physical evidence available, but a study of the way the people lived, the challenges they faced, and the beliefs that they held may add to our understanding of it.
Judging upon a myriad of historical examples and logical reasoning, it can be seen that an emergence of social and gender inequality almost always occurs as a result of warfare, whereupon a caste of male warriors rises above the rest of society. There is every evidence that this did not occur in Neolithic Orkney. No martial weapons survive, and none of the many sites of the period are martially fortified in any way. The population of surviving settlements such as Skara Brae which date to Neolithic times could not have sustained warfare, and in the sparsely populated islands it would have been difficult and pointless to engage in conflict. The size of the settlements is also evidence that they must have maintained co-operative communications, as the workforce of several villages would have been required to work together in the construction of their substantial monuments. The various communities must also have intermarried, for the gene pools of such small concentrations of people would not have been sustainable for the amount of time that the settlements remained populated.
Everyday life in a village such as Skara Brae must have been very communal, although each house maintained considerable privacy. The individual dwellings once had doors, perhaps of wood, which could be barred by a slab of stone. Within each house was a separated cell through which ran a drain (2), probably used as toilets, demonstrating a very remarkable recognition of the importance of sanitation and individual privacy. Beyond this, however, there was probably little privacy within the family as everyone lived and slept in a single room which probably lacked partitions. Each dwelling appears to be physically and socially centered around a communal hearth, where most of the cooking, working, and socializing would no doubt have taken place.
The people of Skara Brae were obviously incredible artisans, as their architecture and implements show. Skara Brae had a specified workshop designated at least partially to stone working. Judging by the many stone chips found in this shop, craftspeople repeatedly heated and cooled their stone (2) to make it easier to carve. Much of the works of these craftspeople demonstrate a remarkable proficiency at their skill, especially small ornate spheres which were carved for an unknown but probably religious purpose (3). They were also incredible bone-carvers, using mostly whale bone which they shaped into beads, pins, bowls, and similar objects. While they did craft pottery which was decorated to some extent, their skill at this did not transcend practicality.
Upon close observation of surviving evidence it can be seen that the people of Skara Brae enjoyed considerable plenty. While they still practiced fishing, hunting, and gathering to a large extent, they also domesticated animals and farmed the land. Although only a small population of pigs were kept due to the lack of trees, the land was perfect for the herding of sheep and cattle making them the chief providers of meat, hide, fleece, and possibly milk. The villagers also hunted the wild game of the island, especially the red deer (1). They gathered limpets which they soaked in basins of water for use as fishing bait (2). They may also have actively hunted whales, or they may have simply taken advantage of the ones that beached themselves upon the shore. While they continued to collect plant foods such as nuts and berries in the wild, the villagers also practiced the agriculture of grains to feed both themselves and their livestock through the winter. One piece of evidence demonstrating the degree of plenty which was enjoyed is the lack of lamb bones to be found (2). In most primitive cultures that experienced winters as harsh as those in the Orkneys, most of the young livestock would have to be slaughtered before the onset of winter because there was not a sufficient surplus of food to keep them alive until spring. Such was not the case in Skara Brae. That enough care and surplus was available to feed the lambs all winter long is notable indeed.
It would appear by the many surviving monuments that science and religion not only went hand-in-hand in Neolithic Orkney, but were practically indistinguishable from one another. Both, as we shall see, were remarkably sophisticated. Twelve kilometers from the village of Skara Brae is a prime example of one of them: a seven meter high human-made mound dating to 3000 B.C., known as Maes Howe. Within the mound of Maes Howe is a chamber, one of the typical types of religious monuments of the Neolithic Era. Entered by a nine meter long, one meter high passage, the chamber is 4.6 square meters on the floor and three meters high in the center of the dome (2). The whole is constructed of massive slabs of local sandstone, some as long as four and a half meters and as heavy as thirty tons (1), which slope steadily inward to form a dome. The physical labour required for such a project is impressive, but the technical knowledge and cunning that the designers must have had is mind-boggling. The fact that these Stone Age people held the knowledge of the mathematics of thrust and counter-thrust to the degree that they could design and construct such a sophisticated structure in a way that has kept it standing for five thousand years should be enough to make us look at them in a new light.
Historians have long called Maes Howe the tomb of a “Priest-King” (1), simply because other Neolithic chamber sites were commonly used as tombs. Other chamber sites of the Orkneys, however, were used as mass tombs, not for individuals who could be associated with a particular leadership role or an upper class. As for Maes Howe, it is ridiculous to label it as a tomb at all as the only human remains found within it were a few tiny skull fragments. What, then, was the purpose of Maes Howe?
The passage of the chamber is of such a shape and co-ordination that the light of the sun enters it only for eighty-one days of the year: the Winter Solstice and the forty exact days before and after it. The passage itself is aligned perfectly with several menhirs, two stone circles, and the location of the setting sun on the shortest day of the year (2). Such alignments can hardly be coincidental, and were obviously carefully calculated and religiously observed. All things considered, it would appear that Maes Howe was not a place of burial, but rather a place of ceremony and worship. The alignments of the passage also bear testimony to the Neolithic Orcadian’s reverence of the sun and value of universal interconnectedness.
One of the stone circles with which the Maes Howe passage aligns is the Ring of Brodgar, 2.4 kilometers away. Originally comprised of sixty megalithic standing stones, equaling a total of twelve thousand tons of stone, the circle took an estimated eighty thousand hours of labour to complete. There can be little doubt that it was erected by a society that was in close co-operation and had enough surplus to afford so much time devoted to their beliefs. Again, we can only marvel at the mathematical accuracy of the design. The Ring is in the form of a perfect circle, and historians such as Professor Alexander Thom have concluded that the designers based the layout upon Pythagorean triangles of whole numbers. Looking again at astronomical alignments, it has often been proposed that the Ring of Brodgar was used as an astronomical observatory. It is interesting to note that many astronomically-based religions that we have record of associate the sun with masculine energies and the moon with feminine ones, and the Ring of Brodgar lays notably equal importance on both. The Ring is surrounded by a ditch, three meters deep by 9 meters wide, which is crossed by two entrance causeways. One causeway is in the South-East, aligning with the sunrise on the Summer Solstice, the other in the North-West, aligning with the Winter Solstice sunset. Of even more interest is that the site is positioned perfectly for the observation of the lunar cycles, most notably the major lunar ‘standstill’ which occurs only once every 18.61 years (2). That the people who erected these stones had the dedication and tenacity to make the long and laborious process of observing, calculating, and constructing these projects shows just how much they were capable of and the deep value that these sites embodied for them.
It is difficult to determine the exact nature of the rituals that took place at these religious sites, but they were almost certainly in correspondence with the Solstices, lunar standstills, and other astronomical events. The notion that sacrifices of humans or animals were made has become acknowledged as a fantasy which does not predate the 19th Century (1), and there is no evidence to support the existence of this practice. Some record of Norse and Celtic rituals which took place at similar Neolithic sites later in history can still be found (2). For example, the Norse practiced their marriage ceremonies in the Rings of Stenness and Brodgar. The bride would swear her oath of love to the groom in the Stenness Circle, before all of the gods, and the groom would do the same for the bride in the Ring of Brodgar. Then the two would hold hands through a now-destroyed menhir which had a hole through it, sealing the marriage. Another account tells of a Norseman passing nine times around the Ring of Brodgar on his knees as an act of either worship or penance. According to Julius Caesar in the 50’s B.C., the Celts of Britain held a great festival near Stonehenge once a year, which consisted of great revelry to celebrate the visitation of the “Great Goddess”, apparently their principal deity. It is unknown just how much these ceremonies reflect those of the builders, but they may offer us some insight into the nature of the earlier practices which may have influenced them.
It is difficult to discern why the monuments and settlements of the Orkneys were abandoned as they were, but they were surely left in a calm and deliberate way. The village of Skara Brae was ritually filled in with consecutive layers of the occupant’s belongings and midden so that it could not be reoccupied (2), just as the previous village that it was built on top of had been. It may be that a change in climate for the cooler and the clouding of the skies caused them to migrate to a more temperate climate with clearer skies to continue their astronomical observations. Some mysteries we cannot solve with anything more than speculation.
Silent as they are, the monuments of Neolithic Orkney can tell us much about those who erected them. They tell of a time and place where humans were not their own enemies. They tell of the extraordinary feats that humans can accomplish when they live in mutual co-operation. They tell of a people who, great as they were, felt honoured and humbled by the skies above them. They tell an amazing lesson which speaks to us across the millennia, a lesson as important today as it has ever been.


Reference Citations

1. Linklater, E. 1965. Orkney and Shetland: An Historical, Geographical, Social and Scenic Survey. p. 20-26. Robert Hale Ltd., London.

2. Marshall. 2004. Europe’s Lost Civilization: Uncovering the Mysteries of the Megaliths. p. 7-19. Headline Book Publishing, London.

3. Ingpen, R, and P. Wilkinson. 1990. Encyclopedia of Mysterious Places: The Life and Legends of Ancient Sites Around the World. p. 21-25. Viking Studio Books, United States of America.

Bibliography

Ingpen, Robert, and Phillip Wilkinson. Encyclopedia of Mysterious Places: The Life and Legends of Ancient Sites Around the World. United States of America: Viking Studio Books, 1990.

Linklater, Erik. Orkney and Shetland: An Historical, Geographical, Social and Scenic Survey. London, Great Britain: Robert Hale Ltd., 1965.

Marshall, Peter. Europe’s Lost Civilization: Uncovering the Mysteries of the Megaliths. London, Great Britain: Headline Book Publishing, 2004

Walker, Robert. World Civilizations: A Comparative Study. Don Mills, Canada: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Neolithic Europe. Wikipedia. March 18, 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Europe.