Transcript

2.13.25 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and to
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day I would be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated January
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February twenty twenty five. As a reminder, Radio Eye is
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a reading service intended for people who are blind or
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have other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.
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Please join me now for the article titled Discover the
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Astounding Secrets of Scotland's Stone Age Settlements by Peter Ross.
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One ordinary day in the spring of two thousand three,
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Carol Howey was washing dishes at the kitchen sink when
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a sound, or rather a sudden absence of sound, caused
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her to glance out the window. She had lived here
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on the land between the locks for six years, and
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she had become used to the view Orkney's every day miracle,
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the hills of Hoy, the waters of Stenesse and Horay,
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and just up the road the Ring of Broadgar, Scotland's
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biggest stone circle. What snagged her attention was the realization
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that she could no longer hear the tractor it had
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been passing up and down plowing a field belonging to
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her neighbors, preparing for the sowing of wild flowers in
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ground that for years had been given over to barley.
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Ho We didn't know it yet, but the planned meadow
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would not now happen. A very different crop was about
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to emerge. As the plow worked the southern part of
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the field. It had caught on something heavy and dragged
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it from where it lay. That was why the tractor
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had stopped. Hoe We watched as the plow rose from
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the earth. There was a slab lodged between its blades.
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It wasn't any old stone, she recalls now, It looked
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like it had been deliberately made. The rectangular object was
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a little over five feet long. Four semicircular notches along
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one side appeared very like hand holds. The Orkney Islands
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are rich in prehistoric sites, and it was thought at
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first that the slab could be the capstone of a
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type of Bronze Age burial known as a cyst. The
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possibility of human remains prompted investigation, and when a week
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or so later two archaeologists arrived from the Scottish Mainland,
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Hoey was given a trowel and invited to help. What
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was revealed as she scraped the earth was the top
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of a wall. It was so exciting and enthralling. I
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was the first person to see that in thousands of
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years this was not a grave but a building, and
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not Bronze Age but older Neolithic, and it was thought
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likely that there was more to be discovered. I didn't realize,
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how he says, how big it was going to be.
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No one did, how could they? The subsequent Nests of
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Broadger excavation, the Nests to its familiars would soon become
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one of the largest and longest running archaeological digs in Britain,
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and what has revealed is remarkable. A complex of monumental
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structures built, rebuilt, and eventually destroyed with ceremony and purpose
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over a period of around twelve hundred years. In their
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stately ruins, the remains of these structures offer glimpses of
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the Stone Age people who made them, people at once
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familiar and deeply strange, whose voices are lost, but whose
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sharp minds and skilled hands can be inferred and admired.
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The Nests is a window into the ancient past. The
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view it offers is breathtaking. Orkney is an archipelago of
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seventy or so islands lying off the northeast tip of Scotland.
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Everywhere in Orkney there is a sense of age, the dark,
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backward and abysm. The late Orcadian poet George mackay Brown wrote,
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the islands have been inhabited for a very long time,
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from before the day of the plow. The largest island
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is referred to as the Mainland, though the Vikings knew
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it as Hrassi. Orkney is full of Norse names, and
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every map is a poem. Bay of scale, water of
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the Wicks, Candle of the Nuik. The Vikings settling in
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the late eighth century found the islands covered in prehistoric sites.
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The Orkneyenga saga, an Icelandic text, tells the story of
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a raiding party caught out by a snowstorm who took
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shelter in what they called Orcahgger, a neolithic burial mound. There,
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in the dark of the dead house, two of the
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warriors lost their mines. Orcahgger is famous these days as
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may Show a popular visitor attraction. You can go inside
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the stone chamber and see Viking graffiti carved on the
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ancient walls. A dragon, a serpent, a forest of ruins.
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I first traveled to Orkney toward the end of July
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the fairy cutting a furrow through the Pentland Firth, the
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body of water that separates mainland Scotland from the islands.
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Puffins sat up on waves and beat their wings. We
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passed Flata, a small island where oil from the rigs
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is piped ashore for processing. The gas flaring from its
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stack was orange as a puffin's feet. Arriving at the
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ferry terminal by the vill village of Saint Margaret's Hope,
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I went north through a chain of islands linked by
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causeways South ronaldsay Bury, Glimpse Home, Lambholme, the mainland, until
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I came to the ness of broadger Ness. Another North
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derived word means Headland Rodgar is Bridge Farm. The approach
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to the site, especially on foot, is like entering another world.
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There is a sense of a threshold. Crossed. A nearly
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twenty foot monolith, the watch Stone stands sentinel at one
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end of a narrow bridge leading to the nests. You
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half expected to pose a riddle in return for passage.
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To one side of the bridge is the fresh water
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Loch of Horay, on the other the salt water loch
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of steenss Ynyang Lakes. In a liminal zone, I passed
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through an open farm gate and made for Carrol Howies
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to have old house repurposed as dig h Q the
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headquarters of the excavation team. Being on site felt like
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walking through a major construction project. The nests isthmus covers
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an area of seven acres and large parts had been
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exposed the ruins of a great settlement with origins in
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the mid fourth millennium b c. Forty buildings have been
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identified within the excavated area. Geophysical surveying a variety of
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non invasive imaging technologies to detect man made structures underground
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suggests a total of around one hundred and twenty, but
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it is thought that this is an underestimate and the
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true figure could be two hundred. Seen from above a
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drone's eye view, the footprint of buildings with curved walls
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was clear, but from the ground it appeared a chaos
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of stone. The people of the nests built new structures
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on the ruins of old ones, with the result that
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we now see remains from different periods in the same
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physical space. It is up to art the archaeologists to
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make sense of it all. Welcome to the Nests of Broadger.
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I heard a tour guide Tellus Party. Most of the
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monuments you can see in this landscape date from the
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Neolithic the New Stone Age. The earliest evidence of Neolithic
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activity in Britain is around forty one hundred b C.
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The Neolithic is defined by the adoption of agriculture. We
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shift from being hunter gatherers to settling down and farming.
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The earliest evidence of agriculture in Orkney is thirty seven
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hundred b C. So it takes a couple of centuries
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to get here. Like most things, there was laughter at that,
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but when it does arrive, it flourishes. A few dozen
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visitors stood at the lip of a trench, trying to
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make sense of the structures within. Diggers bent to their
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labors paid the onlookers no mind. They were five feet
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down and five thousand years away. What's more, they had
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a deadline. This was to be the last season. The
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Nests was in the final weeks of its strange second life.
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Unlike the prehistoric village of Scarabray, six miles or so
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to the northwest, which was built from a hard, resilient
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stone gathered from the nearby coast, the buildings of the
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Nests were made from a softer quarried stone that cannot
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be left exposed to the elements. It's going to turn
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to dust, the guide explained, scooping up a handful of
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fragments from the top of a wall and letting it
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fall through his fingers. Five six years, I think a
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huge proportion of this would be gone, so it must
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return to the conditions that preserved it for thousands of years.
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Since its discovery, the nest has been excavated for up
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to nine weeks during the summer, at the end of
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which the trenches are covered by tarpaulins held down by
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thousands of old tires. This year, however, would be different.
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All the trenches were to be back filled with the
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material that had been taken out over the years of excavation,
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and which had been piled in a huge spoil heap
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at the edge of the sight. This season was in
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a way one long farewell. Some diggers had been crying,
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others were philosophical. It is going back into the dark,
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one told me. But hopefully we have illuminated some things.
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Visitors to Scarabray are often struck by its hobbity appearance,
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but at the nest one is very far from the
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shire these buildings, whatever their purpose, had been large and
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magnificent walls still stood to three feet or so in
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some places. But what impressed most was their footprint and finish.
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The best of them, Structure twenty seven was approximately fifty
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six feet long by thirty six feet wide, and its masonry,
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even now was clearly masterful, the stone courses so elegant
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and smooth that it gave the curious impression of being
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newly made. Tourists had been known to ask the bemused diggers,
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why are you building this? And when will it be finished?
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As I looked down into the interior, an archaeologist was
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at work in an exposed hearth, a scatter of charcoal
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across its surface. It was easy to imagine people warming
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themselves in the glow so of a fire that thousands
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of years before had burned out for the last time.
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Inside dig h Q, Nick Card was seated at his desk,
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his daubed tam a border Collie, chewing a bone not
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neolithic by his feet. Card, a Scot in his mid
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sixties with silver hair and beard, is the director of
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the excavation and has been with it since its start.
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The ness is for him, not only a place of
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work and endless fascination. It's also his home. For the
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last seven years, he has lived in a farmhouse overlooking
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the excavation from the opposite side of the site to
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Dick h Q. He opens his curtains in the morning
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and looks out at the big skies and big stones
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of a prehistoric landscape. It has a sort of magic,
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he admitted. Every day when he steps down into Structure
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twenty seven, he can't keep from smiling. His intellectual excitement
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was evident during our discussions, as was his admiration for
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the people who built these structures. The quality of the
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work suggested to him specialist trades, skilled masons, skilled quarrymen,
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even some sort of architect, perhaps sketching out the design
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with charcoal on animal skin. He insisted upon their sophistication,
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we must never ever underestimate what our ancestors were capable of. Yet,
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while he praised the builders, Card was reluctant to speculate
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about the use and purpose of what they had built.
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He had once described Structure ten, the largest building, as
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a neolithic cathedral, but now regretted that likening. He was
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coming to the view that it had been built as
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a residence for an individual or family of very high status,
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So closer to a palace, I asked, He frowned, I
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wouldn't call it a palace, a house of renown. It
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is tempting for an outsider to look at the nests,
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its grandeur and conclude that it must have been a
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site of spiritual or political authority, or some mixture of
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the two, But those closest to the excavation are the
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most wary of conjecture. Cards seems especially cautious of speculating
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beyond the known facts, as if to do so would
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be a disservice to the site. The furthest he would
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go was to describe it as a place of gathering
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for masses of people. There is evidence for this, not
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only the size of the buildings, but also deposits that
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indicate preparation and consumption of food on a huge scale.
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Around twenty four hundred BC, at least four hundred cows
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were slaughtered and eaten during one feast or so. Radiocarbon
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dating and other analysis suggests the bones of their shins,
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cracked for marrow, were then arranged around the perimeter of
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Structure ten, as if in celebration. Of wealth, abundance and appetite.
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Who were these feastures, perhaps not only people from the islands.
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Material found at the nests, such as glossy volcanic glass
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from the island of Aran, hint at social and trade
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links with Scotland's West coast, but the connections go much far.
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Orkney seems to have been a cultural and technological innovator
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during the Neolithic. It has been argued that the nearby
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Stones of Steness is the earliest stone circle in Britain,
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a few hundred years older than Stonehenge. Similarly, so called
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grooved ware, a distinctive style of flat bottomed pottery, appears
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to have originated in the archipelago and spread across Britain
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in Ireland. Ideas and the people who carried them were
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on the move. That the nest was a gathering place,
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something akin to a pilgrimage site is an attractive thought. Indeed,
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there is a certain poetry in the way that for
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the last two decades it has exerted a similar pull
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on those who have come summer after summer to dig there.
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The wind howling across the locks is this sort of
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call to prayer During excavation season, there have been up
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to a hundred or so people working at the nests
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at any one time, volunteers, mostly a mix of students, locals,
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archaeologists from elsewhere in Britain. For some, it is offered
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a first taste of a real excavation and the chance
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of an electrifying find. Jessica Houpol was a twenty year
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old archaeology major at Williammette University in Salem, Oregon, when
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in twenty twelve she discovered the so called sky Axe.
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This is a polished stone axe head patterned blue, black
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and white, which when she lifted it from the earth,
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appeared to reflect the clouds passing above. The look on
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her face as she held it card said would stay
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with him forever. When I called Hoypol in Saint Louis,
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where she works in the family business and is no
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longer involved in archaeology, she was still buzzing as she
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recalled that moment. You really do feel connected to the past.
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You're like, holy cow, that was something some one held
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like five thousand years ago. To find an axe that
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beautiful and intact, and to feel the weight of it,
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I was kind of in awe. The sky Axe was
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not lost or discarded. It was made from a type
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of stone not native to Orkney, and it seems to
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have been placed in Structure fourteen as part of a
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ritual deposit marking the end of that building's life before
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the interior was filled with rubble. Neolithic axe heads were
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not always made for use, but rather for esthetic power.
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They may have been given as gifts, expressions of alliance
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and esteem, and is possible that some had a symbolic importance,
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carrying associations with particular people and places. This is the
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elegant serendipity of archaeology. A person is borne toward the
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end of the twentieth century on the far side of
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the Atlantic Ocean, and through a series of choices and coincidences,
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happens to be in precisely the right spot at the
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right time, not a foot to the left or right,
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not five minutes later, coming back from a break to
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uncover an axe head that someone around twenty eight hundred
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BC had put into the earth for reasons of their own.
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The sky axe may have spoken to those who knew
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its origins of distant horizons, and now, thanks to the
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young woman who found it, the skies of the American
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Midwest are part of its story too. Hoypol is not
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the only one moved by a personal discovery at the Nests.
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Joe Borne, an archaeologist and writer from the southeast of England,
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was a week or so into the first of ten
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summers at the sight when she found the Butterfly Stone,
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a heavy slab incised with two examples of the motif
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that has become emblematic of the nests. The main butterfly
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is from wing tip to wing tip, about the length
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of a human hand, and it has been deeply carved,
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probably with the piece of flint. It was a cold,
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wet day when Borne found the stone. She had been
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tasked with removing a pile of rubble blocking entrance to
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the annex of Structure twelve. She had taken away the
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first couple of stones when she saw the butterfly. There
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was a woozy unreality about that first glimpse. It was,
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she recalls, like growing under water in a swimming pool,
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when everything is kind of loud and noisy round you
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and you just dip into some more silent place. There
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is an intimate moment when a digger finds something, when
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it is just them and the object and the hovering
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ghost of whoever touched it last. Then they finished troweling
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it from the ground, and it belongs to the world,
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destined for the museum's storage box or, in the case
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of special finds, the exhibition case and the memory of
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a million phones. The butterfly stone being special falls into
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the second category. I had seen it in London in
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the British Museum, cocooned within glass, as had Juborne. Almost
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ten years after its discovery. I found that on a
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dig in Orkney. She had told a little girl who
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was looking at it, having come into its presence once again,
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she didn't want to walk away, numbered and recorded the
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stone was now part of the material culture of human civilization.
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But does Bourne feel that on some level it is hers? Secretly?
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I do, she replies, there's a feeling of ownership, even
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though intellectually I know that's not the case. Yeah, I
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kind of love it more. Neolithic rock art has been
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discovered at the Nests in excess of twelve hundred examples,
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of which the butterfly stone is the best known than
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in the rest of Britain put together. In addition to
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the butterflies, there are scratches and incisions of various kinds, crosses, diamonds, triangles, zigzags,
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as well as the pecked and ground impressions known as
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cut marks. These shapes don't seem to be representational, nor
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are they a language, and even the word art is
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probably the wrong way to think about them. Art is
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a very post Renaissance term that we're putting onto the
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ancient past, and it may not apply, says Antonia Thomas,
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an archaeologist at the Nests who has studied Orkney's decorated stones.
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But there's something fundamentally human about our need to make
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a mark, to decorate, to leave our imprint for the future.
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That's why these carvings speak to us now, I think
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and transcend the millennia. Looking for meaning in the carvings
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is a frustrating business, but they certainly have a tone.
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There is something anxious about them, something nerve jangling and twitchy.
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Some Thomas suggests may have been aprotrapak that is intended
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to ward off evil. A number of the diggers I
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noticed had commemorated their time at the Nest with tattoos
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of designs discovered at the site. One, though, explained that
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she wouldn't be comfortable having a butterfly inked on her
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body because she simply did not know what it had meant.
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What if it was a spell? A warning? The Neolithic
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mind is unknowable. We are so like and yet so
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unlike these people. We can walk within their buildings, pick
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up their tools, look out over the same water and
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hills as they once did, and yet how they saw
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their world on a deeper level is beyond us. They
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did some really weird things. One day, around twenty five
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hundred BC, four centuries after it had been constructed Structure ten,
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the building nick Card had called a house of renown,
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was abandoned. Its walls were brought low. In its interior,
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where who knows what chief or priest held court, was
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filled with rubble and a substance known as midden, rotted refuse,
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and ash buried. It became a great mound that, until
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twenty years later was thought natural, just another swell in
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the Orkney landscape. The archaeologists digging into it found the house.
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Within the house, they found a hearth. Within the hearth,
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they found an object placed there long ago, as one
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assumes some sort of closing offering, the skull of a
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cow inverted. Whether this was an act of propitiation, remembrance,
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or thanksgiving is uncertain. At the time, no doubt the
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gesture would have been well understood, its meaning and resonance clear,
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But it has come down to us the forgetful inheritors
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as an object that perplexes and disturbs. Cattle were fundamental
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to Neolithic Orkney. They provided leather, milk and meat, but
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their value, according to Mark Edmond's co director at the nests,
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was more than physical and economic. The emphasis on breeding
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and blood lines, he thought, would have made herds proxies
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for human communities. So yes, they are a great source
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of material wealth, but also a rich source of metaphor.
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You talk to farmers here in Orkney and they get
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that that skull in the hearth could well have been
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a known beast, an animal with the name and life
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history associated with a particular person or family. There could
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even have been something sacred about it, holy cow, as
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Jessica Haupel had said. Nick Card was in dig h Q.
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On the desk was his favorite trowel, his first name
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carved into the handle, which he intended to bury on
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site as a token of his involvement in hundreds of years,
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perhaps some one will dig it up and go Nick
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who we walked through the house to the kitchen and
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stood by the window. So he said, this is where
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it all started. He pointed to where Carol Howey saw
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the tractor stop and where the first stone must have
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come up. We were looking out at what was once
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again farmland. The spoil heap was gone, most of the
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trenches had already been filled, and over the next week
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or so, if the weather held, the rest would be
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put back underground. A goose flying overhead would not now
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make much of the nests, just another field on the
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way to the wintering grounds. But four Acadians hardly that
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this place makes you proud to be an islander. As
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how one local digger, Sigurd Tawi, had summed it up.
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Why proud something to do with the enabled connection to
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Orkney folk of the past. They undoubtedly went through the
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same things as we do. Towery said, the darkness of midwinter,
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the joy of equinox, when the days are equal and
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you know that the daylight's coming back midsummer, and knowing
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that darkness is coming cold wind. They knew this place.
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It's the continuation of a long long human story car
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and I went outside, mud squelched underfoot. Trench Jay was gone,
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and trench's X and Y and trench P where the
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sky axe and butterfly stone had been found, was almost
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completely covered. All that remained was the center of Structure ten,
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and there, in the week morning light was the hearth
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where the cow'skull had been placed upside down. The director
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led the way past dig h Q, past two lichens,
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shaggy standing stones in the garden, and down a slope
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to Structure twenty seven, tam running ahead and stopping at
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the edge of the trench. Work had not yet begun
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on back filling this building. It was the last to
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be excavated and would be the last to be buried.
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For card the ness is his legacy. Even though there
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were many structures that hadn't yet been excavated, even though
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it was frustrating that he would never explore them, he
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knew that covering the site was for the best. It
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had to be returned to the Earth's protective embrace. Besides,
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there were years of post excavation analysis ahead. There were
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books to be written, stories to be told, and yet
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he was finding it difficult to witness the building's disappear.
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He had often been close to tears during our conversations.
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The Nests has been such a big part of my
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life for the last twenty years, he said. It's filled
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many of my waking hours and sometimes sleeping hours as well.
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It has fulfilled many boy head dreams when I thought
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about being an archaeologist and making a discovery like this.
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It's the discovery of not just one lifetime, but several.
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We walked down some steps cut into the earth bank
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and stood by a large upright slab that had formed
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on one side of the building's narrow entrance. Card invited
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me to notice the inner edge, how rounded it was.
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He said it had been warned by thousands of people
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brushing against it as they passed in and out. This
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is what we leave of ourselves, a smooth edge on
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an old stone. Very early the next morning, as I
25:27
drove through the dark to catch the ferry home, I
25:31
passed the road leading to the Nests. There was a
25:34
single light on out there on the isthmus, and I
25:37
wondered if it was Card. It must surely be strange
25:40
for him to live there now, overlooking the buried sight,
25:44
no longer able to see the buildings he loves, yet
25:48
it feels right that he will have their keeping, like
25:51
the watch stone on the other side of the bridge.
25:54
I had told him the last time we spoke that
25:57
I imagined him in years to come as a watcher
26:01
or a guardian of the nests. He is a highly
26:05
practical person, and I had expected him to dismiss this
26:09
as whimsy, but he nodded. You don't own the land,
26:14
you don't own the house. You are just here for
26:17
a fleeting moment in the history of this landscape. So
26:20
a guardian, Yeah, I'd go with that. Finally, ask Smithsonian,
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you've got questions, we've got experts. Question from Wilby mc cleod,
26:34
Savage Harbor, Prince Edward Island. Did colonial Americans wear wrist watches?
26:40
The answer is from Carline Stevens, Curator of Clocks and Watches,
26:45
National Museum of American History. By the middle of the
26:49
seventeen hundreds, women and men from a range of professions,
26:53
including those who founded the United States, owned watches. Thomas Jefferson,
26:58
for example, owned perhaps eight. George Washington had at least one,
27:03
but these were not worn on the wrist. A woman
27:06
usually wore hers near the waistband of the of her dress.
27:11
A man wore his in his fob, a pocket with
27:14
a horizontal opening just below the waist of his breeches.
27:18
Connected to the watch, but hanging outside the pocket might
27:21
have been a tassel or short metal chains to hold
27:24
a watch, winding key, a seal, or other trinkets. The
27:28
wrist watch as we know it originated in the second
27:31
half of the eighteen hundreds. It first appeared as an
27:35
expensive piece of women's jewelry. Mary Todd Lincoln owned one,
27:40
an enameled Bengal set with diamonds and a tiny watch
27:44
movement fashioned by a Swiss maker. Several more evolutionary steps
27:49
occurred before the wrist watch emerged as a standard time
27:54
keeper for women and men in the twentieth century. This
28:00
concludes readings from the Smithsonian magazine for to day, your
28:04
reader has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening, and
28:08
have a great day.