Skara Brae

Skara Brae, one of the most perfectly preserved Stone Age villages in Europe, which was covered for hundreds of years by a sand dune on the shore of the Bay of Skaill, Mainland, Orkney Islands, Scotland. Exposed by a great storm in 1850, four buildings were excavated during the 1860s by William Watt. After another storm in 1926, further excavations were undertaken by the Ancient Monuments branch of the British Ministry of Works. During the 1970s radiocarbon dating established that the settlement was inhabited from about 3200 to 2200 bce. In 1999, as part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney, Skara Brae was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, along with Maes Howe, a large chambered tomb, as well as two ceremonial stone circles, the Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar.

Though the dwellings at Skara Brae are built of undressed slabs of stone from the beach, put together without any mortar, the drift sand that filled them immediately after their evacuation preserved the walls in places to a height of eight feet. Because there were no trees on the island, furniture had to be made of stone and thus also survived. The village consisted of several one-room dwellings, each a rectangle with rounded corners, entered through a low, narrow doorway that could be closed by a stone slab.

When the village was abruptly deserted it consisted of seven or eight huts linked together by paved alleys. Six huts had been put artificially underground by banking around them midden consisting of sand and peat ash stiffened with refuse, and the alleys had become tunnels roofed with stone slabs. The whole residential complex was drained by a sewer into which the drains from individual huts discharged.

The inhabitants of the village lived mainly on the flesh and presumably the milk of their herds of tame cattle and sheep and on limpets and other shellfish. They probably dressed in skins. For their equipment the villagers relied exclusively on local materials—stone, beach pebbles, and animal bones. Vessels were made of pottery; though the technique was poor, most vessels had elaborate decoration. As ornaments the villagers wore pendants and coloured beads made of the marrow bones of sheep, the roots of cows’ teeth, the teeth of killer whales, and boars’ tusks. Games were played with dice of walrus ivory and with knucklebones.

A number of stones in the walls of the huts and alleys bear roughly scratched lozenge and similar rectilinear patterns. Beneath the walls the foundations of older huts were discovered. In plan and furniture these agreed precisely with the material found covering them. The pottery of the lower levels was adorned with incised as well as relief designs. Among these was the true spiral represented on one potsherd—the only example of this pattern in pottery known in prehistoric Britain.