[Photos] UK 28 - Skara Brae

[moonvoice]

I'll be frank, Glen cares a lot more about these kinds of places than I do. Glen sort of loves built history, and I love natural history, and we make that work. Skara Brae I objectively recognise as being very significant, but at the end of the day, I was more happy to have gone there for the sake of going there, than out of any sense of feeling or connection to the place itself. I felt far more for even the ocean beyond Skara Brae (which you will see towards the end of my photos).

I'm sure I was influenced in part by fatigue. Being exhausted and sore, and not realising that Skara Brae was such a walk from the heritage centre, as soon as I realised how far away it was I already had a sinking feeling. I just took it very slowly. Not for the first time, I was confronted with my own actual ability vs. how I imagine myself in my mind. But taking it slow was actually the right thing to do, and I'm glad I did it. And we were blessed with incredible weather.

Also the whole place stunk of manure and sheep shit, you can't really escape the fact that there is farming literally everywhere around you, and in view of the site itself. Tbh, I kind of loved that.


Skara Brae, a Neolithic UNESCO site that is older than the Stonehenge and Great Pyramids.




No I can't really read it either. But suffice to say that Skara Brae is on the UNESCO World Heritage List for being a Neolithic Site that is old as balls (consisting of 8 individual houses occupied from about 3,180 BC to 2,500 BC). Older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids, it is a stone-built Neolithic settlement that has - thanks to being buried for so long - been excellently preserved.

It was discovered around 1850, but was only properly excavated and explored around the 1920s. To this day, even though it has been one of the most thoroughly explored Neolithic sites in the world, new technology enables people to still do dissertations on the site and the findings.



A lot of items found within Skara Brae are preserved in the heritage centre.



The information was actually organised in a really interesting way. Everything was generally colour coded, with one colour indicating 'things we know as factually true' and another as 'things we have inferred culturally from what we have found, but may not be objectively true' and yet another as 'philosophical speculations about the time period.' These smaller placards weren't, but they were always quick to indicate that though there is a lot we do know, there is more that we don't know.



They had games and dice, beads and blades, and a great deal more besides. There were intricate bowls and plates, toys for children, there was found dried and fresh foods, creels for crabbing and more. I had a vast array of photos from the inside of the museum, partly as research, and culled a lot down, but the inside of the heritage centre while small, is really rich and rewarding. It's been very well-maintained.



Skara Brae itself







Modern barns in the background.







On the walk down from the heritage centre. This bay is artificial, with concrete and then stones trucked in. There has been issues with erosion and the preservation of Skara Brae, so an artificial erosion block has been created.



Looking out from Skara Brae

Comments

[cmcmck]

It's muck spreading time of course hence the pong!

[moonvoice]

Oh yeah I figured, hence the whole 'can't really escape the fact that farming is going on all around you' :)

[yourdeer]

the color-coded info cards sound very cool - I'd be so happy to see museums and heritage sites adopt that kind of system. Our local Museum of Fine Arts (which has been getting slowly better about respecting various cultures, despite some serious mishaps) has several items on display that are definitely described based on outdated racist/colonialist conjecture, and I feel like a system that points out what is objectively known vs. what was guessed would be very useful.

Thank you for sharing all the photos - they're lovely <3

[moonvoice]

Yeah it'd be a great system to see implemented elsewhere, and was a really great way of differentiating between statements, interpretations and assumptions. Like 'we found stone blades' (fact) 'they may have been used to do these things' (interpretation) 'we think this means they were capable of X' (assumption). I think that would've been really helpful for kids who came through too!

[elinox]

It looks like a really lovely site!

Not being that drawn to neolithic history, would you still think making the trek to Skara Brae was worth it?

[moonvoice]

I enjoyed Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar more, but by the time you've done those two, then yeah. I also think the museum is really awesome. But also, it's Orkney, by the time you're there, these really significant sites are so close by it becomes weirder not to do it, heh.

[silverjackal]

I am a nut about archaeology as well as natural history, so I am drooling over these photos. I also love the way the museum clearly distinguished between what is actually known, and what is theorised. Did you get any sort of signature from the land there, or was it silent?

[moonvoice]

For me it was completely silent, and not for lack of being open or curious? Just...nothing for me. If anything when I sort of opened myself up to see what was around, that was when I started paying far more attention to the land around the site (all the ocean photos for example was because I spent so much time gazing out of at it). And the land itself...I mean it had attempted to bury Skara Brae, and it's been artificially excavated by people, I just feel like the land itself is not interested in having the place exposed to people, but wants it internalised within itself, which is...very weird and hard to explain.

The museum was small but lovingly maintained. I talked to the guy about whether anyone was still doing any studies here, because obviously it's such a well excavated site, and he said recently a woman came to do her dissertation and brought new infrared and other ground scanning technologies and found out a bunch of new stuff (I can't remember the specifics, but it was pretty significant) and we talked about how great it was that information can still be found depending on the evolution of technology.

[silverjackal]

information can still be found depending on the evolution of technology

This is actually why modern archaeologists take great care to leave at least a portion of any known significant site intact (assuming it's not going to be destroyed by outside forces) -- in order to leave things to be found in the future when methods have improved yet more. So much was lost historically because people were only interested in ripping up the valuables or the dramatic bits.

What you say about the land there actually makes sense to me. Again, I'll recommend that book by Josephine McCarthy that I did before -- I think you'll find it interesting at least.