September 2002
Research and Teaching

Village sheds new light on Iron Age

Startling new evidence is currently being excavated by the Shetland Amenity Trust and the University at the Iron Age Village of Old Scatness.

The site in the Northern Isles comprises a defended Iron Age Village with buildings standing over 2 metres high. The site is providing new dating evidence which is challenging traditional concepts.

Left: The Bradford archaeology team has dicovered a rare incise carving of a bear in sandstone at the Iron Age village of Scatness.

The focal point of the village is a monumental broch tower, the home of the village's leaders. Radiocarbon dating of the construction level of the broch and waste dating to the earliest use of the broch have now provided dates which calibrate to a period of 400 to 200 B.C. The team has also discovered an incise carving of a bear in sandstone, lying face down in the floor of a house. It is typical of Pictish symbol stones that one finds between 650 and 850 A.D.

The symbol stone has had some breaking in the past and a small piece missing but the quality of carving is extremely high. The find, which is very rare, points to the continuous status of the old Scatness site, which was a power base for the social elite, into the late iron age. Lecturer in Archaeology and Excavation Director Steve Dockrill says the bear carving is an 'outstanding' find.

He said: "There are very, very few bear carvings. The ones that we have are mostly what are called Class Two stones, but this is a Class One. To my knowledge, this is the only Class One bear that we have. The Class Two stones have Christian symbols, but Class One stones are thought to be perhaps a little earlier."

Past theories about broch development suggested that the site's monuments were built in a period between 100 B.C. to 100 A.D. Early excavations of brochs revealed Roman artefacts which led antiquarians to associate these towers with a response to the threat of Roman invasion. More recently, archaeologists have interpreted their construction as the result of migrations of Iron Age people forced to the north by the expansion of Rome. A number of models were proposed for the westward movement of peoples building brochs with an eventual flowering of broch construction at Mousa, Shetland, which is currently the highest broch, surviving to 13m.

Steve said: "This is really exciting as it challenges past theories about these impressive sites found throughout North Atlantic Scotland. This new evidence clearly indicates that the origin of these monuments requires a very different explanation. These sites represent an indigenous innovation reflecting a complex and well organised society with the economic wealth to build them."

These new dates are part of a wider dating programme analysing the development of the broch and village. Three scientific methods are being used to date the site: radio carbon dates from carbonised barley; archaeomagnetic dating of the last use of hearths - by Cathy Batt, at the University; and the dating of quartz grains by optically stimulated luminescence - by Ed Rhodes, at the University of Oxford. A number of aisled wheelhouses have been firmly dated to the first century B.C. using all three methods. These are clearly later than the broch itself.

Of all the broch sites in Scotland, Old Scatness is the most fully dated site whose settlement history spans some 2500 years.

• Photographs of the dig can be found at www.brad.ac.uk/acad/archsci/field_proj/scat02/

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