We already know that the Minoan
expansion hit its high point Eastern Atlantic seaboard
for centuries before then so that the challenge facing them in obtaining bronze
fro the Egyptians was not insurmountable.
This community shows us excellent
stone working skills and it is on Orkney which also insures excellent
seamanship. Whether indigenous or a
transplanted group brought in by perhaps the Minoans we cannot know. However they were clearly participating in
the stone culture just prior to the arrival of the bronze saw.
The seamanship also spells out
that the cultural influence then ran down the west side of Britain through to the location of Stonehenge and should be linked.
It appears likely that Minoan
astronomical knowledge drove the rest of the ensuing building boom. Recall that early structures and circles
would all have been in wood and that the stone versions would have been erected
as a later expression of this knowledge.
A base on Orkney is a natural
location for shipping into the Baltic and the many troves of amber in the Mediterranean affirms that trade.
Scottish site also home to northern Europe 's
oldest painted walls.
Photograph courtesy Hugo Whymark, ORCA
The "Brodgar Boy" figurine. Photograph courtesy Hugo Whymark,
ORCA.
James Owen
Published January 27, 2012
On an island off Britain 's
northern tip, new discoveries suggest a huge Stone Age ritual complex is older
than Stonehenge.
But age is only the half of it. Researchers say the site may have in
fact been the original model for Stonehenge
and other later, better-known British complexes to the south.
First discovered in 2002, the waterside site—called the Ness of Brodgar
("Brodgar promontory")—lies on Mainland, the largest of Scotland's
Orkney Islands (map).
According to recent radiocarbon dating of burned-wood remains, the Ness was first occupied around 3200 B.C. and went on to
include up to a hundred buildings within a monumental walled enclosure.
By contrast, the earliest earthworks at Stonehenge
date to about 3000 B.C. And it would be roughly another 500 years before the
first of the famous stones were set on Salisbury Plain. (Interactive
time line: "Stages of Stonehenge.") [Coincidental with the Minoan
establishment of trade to support the building of the Great pyramid]
In addition, ritual gatherings at the Ness of Brodgar may have
foreshadowed feasts Stonehenge and similar
sites such as Avebury.
"Orkney is one of the keys to understanding the development of
Neolithic religion," said site director Nick Card of the Orkney Research
Centre for Archaeology.
Massive Final Feast
The idea of Orkney as a font of Stone Age culture isn't completely new.
It's been suspected, for example, that so-called grooved-ware pottery,
which became dominant in Neolithic Britain
Despite its apparent influence, the Ness
wouldn't last in this incarnation forever.
The dating of animal bones found around the finely crafted temple
indicates that a huge feast ceremony was held in about 2300 B.C., after which
the temple was effectively "decommissioned," Card said.
"We are perhaps looking at the remains [almost exclusively shin
bones] of 600 individual cattle, which in anybody's book is a massive feast."
The Height of Stone Age Décor
The new date is based on excavations at the Ness
of Brodgar in 2011, when researchers made a slew of discoveries inside the
complex's temple, which was first unearthed in 2008.
The 82-foot-long (25-meter-long) building, which has 16-foot-thick
(5-meter-thick) outer walls, contains an "inner sanctum," where
Card's team found stone shelved furniture, or "dressers," placed
against each wall.
"We have four of these stone dressers, which are almost at the
cardinal points of the compass," Card said. "They probably functioned
like an altar."
Made of red and yellow sandstone, the Stone Age furniture was
"beautifully finished" and represented "the very top end of the
market" for their time, the archaeologist noted.
The 2011 excavation also found further examples of mysterious geometric
stone carvings that decorate the complex as well as evidence for the production
of paints. Traces of orange, red and yellow paintwork were first detected on
walls in 2010.
"There's a small chamber where there was evidence of different
colors of ochre and little grinding stones with little hollows in them, where
the pigment had obviously been ground up," Card said.
"I think we've always envisaged that Neolithic man would have used
color, maybe as a makeup or for dying clothes, but this is the oldest evidence
in northern Europe of the use of color on the
walls of buildings," he said.
Other major finds from 2011 include an extremely rare, crudely wrought
Neolithic human figure fashioned from clay.
"It's got a head with two eyes and a body and has been nicknamed
the Brodgar Boy," Card said. "It was in the rubble of one of the
smaller structures."
World Heritage Site
Bounded by a 13-foot-thick (4-meter-thick) stone wall, the Ness of
Brodgar is located between two other important monuments, the Ring of Brodgar
and the Standing Stones of Stenness—all part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney UN World
Heritage site.
Archaeologist Mark Edmonds thinks that thousands of years ago, the Ness was a place where Orkney's Neolithic farming
communities gathered in large numbers for seasonal rituals and to commemorate
the dead—a pattern likely later repeated farther south.
"What begins to happen at these sites in the later part of the
Neolithic does seem to reflect the influence of ideas that are first brought
into focus in Orkney," said Edmonds, of the University of York, who wasn't
part of the 2011 excavation.
The Ness, Stonehenge
(pictures), Avebury, and so on "are clearly ceremonial centers that
bring lots of people together on a scale that you just wouldn't see at any
other time and place" in late Stone Age Britain, the archaeologist added.
The complexes also all appear to share a common layout, roughly
speaking.
"We get the impression that they not only have places where the
dead are congregated and where the ceremonial events take place, but there are
also places where the living congregate," he said.
The Ness of Brodgar "has the potential to transform our
understanding of the later Neolithic in Britain ,"
Edmonds
"I think it will help us to understand the nature of belief
systems at the time," he said. "It will give us a far better insight
into the social and political context in which these ceremonies and rituals
took place."
Site director Card agreed, and pointed out that less than 10 percent of
the Ness complex has been excavated.
"We're still really just scratching the surface," he said.
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