Orkney Gateway to the Atlantic

The 2009 student team with Jane Downes and Julie Bond on an educational visit to the Standing Stones of Stenness

This new archaeological project commenced at the end of June 2009 and centred on the island of Rousay. The research project forms a new international field school for the North Atlantic Biocultural Organisation (NABO) and complements others in the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland. NABO is a non-profit making research co-operative investigating human settlement and adaptation across the North Atlantic. Researchers are from Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, Faroes, Iceland, and North America. This Orkney project is led by Steve Dockrill and Julie Bond from the Division of AGES, University of Bradford and Jane Downes, Ingrid Mainland and Julie Gibson from Orkney College, UHI.

Orkney offers some of the best archaeology in Northern Europe, as shown by the stone circle at Stenness, which forms part of the World Heritage Area (Heart of Neolithic Orkney). This rich archaeological resource provides an educational background to the students’ training.

The protected archaeology in the World Heritage Area forms the tip of an archaeological iceberg, with many Orcadian sites being endangered by coastal erosion. This situation will be exacerbated further by global warming and resulting sea level change. The eroding sites have huge research potential and are able to provide important archaeological and scientific data which can inform us on how people confronted the marginality of these northern islands in the past.

The archaeological information offered by these sites can be increased with intensive landscape survey (topographical and geophysical) together with targeted test pitting and selective excavation to answer key questions. These techniques introduce the student to a wide range of skills.