Julie Bond

• Lecturer at University of Bradford

This chapter discusses excavations at Hamar and Underhoull in Unst, Shetland, an island where a uniquely high number of longhouses of apparently Viking or Norse date have been found through survey, in a density and state of preservation unparalleled elsewhere in Britain. The excavations have revealed that a longer, and far more complex, settlement...

The archaeological evidence at Old Scatness, Shetland, identifies a ‘transitional phase’ with changes in the cultural and economic assemblages suggesting that the Pictish village was occupied by incomers of Scandinavian origin, who gradually adopted and reorganised the settlement. This phase may have been more complex than originally thought, with...

Brochs are monumental Iron Age (c.400–200 BC) drystone towers or roundhouses. They are only found in Scotland, particularly the Atlantic north and west. Whilst the structural layout of brochs has long been debated, few measured surveys have been conducted. Three significant broch sites form the tentative World Heritage site of “Mousa, Old Scatness...

This Short Note describes the distribution and composition of the great auk assemblage found within the Covesea Caves, and discusses its significance.

The excavations by T.C.M Brewster and J.S. Dent between 1964 and 1989 at the multi‐period site at Wetwang Slack, East Yorkshire, has gained international importance for its square barrow cemetery and multiple Arras‐style Iron Age cart/chariot burials. A lesser known fact is that the excavations also produced the largest Iron Age faunal assemblage i...

Humans, as agents, played an active role in the creation and communication of new identities during the Viking period in the Orkney Islands and Iceland. The authors argue that environments are not merely passive backdrops to societal and identity formation but are dynamic contributors in the negotiations that take place when humans settle into new...

Understanding the chronology of Norse settlement is crucial for deciphering the archaeology of many sites across the North Atlantic region and developing a timeline of human-environment interactions. There is ambiguity in the chronology of settlements in areas such as the Northern Isles of Scotland, arising from the lack of published sites that hav...

Bioarchaeological evidence suggests that the site of Grimes Graves, Norfolk, characterised by the remains of several hundred Late Neolithic flint mineshafts, was a permanently settled community with a mixed farming economy during the Mid-Late Bronze Age (c. 1400 BCE – c. 800 BCE). The aim of this study was to investigate, through isotope ratio anal...

The identification of dairying is essential if we are to understand economies of the past, particularly in northwest Europe, where a high degree of lactose tolerance suggests that fresh milk has long been a significant food product. This paper explores a possible link between economic focus and seasonality of calving. Although cattle (Bos taurus) c...

The offshore islands of the North Atlantic were among some of the last settled places on earth, with humans reaching the Faroes and Iceland in the late Iron Age and Viking period. While older accounts emphasizing deforestation and soil erosion have presented this story of island colonization as yet another social–ecological disaster, recent archaeo...

New radiocarbon dates for the Neolithic settlement at Pool on Sanday, Orkney, are interpreted in a formal chronological framework. Phases 2.2 and 2.3, during which flat-based Grooved Ware pottery with incised decoration developed, have been modelled as probably dating to between the 31st and 28th centuries cal bc . There followed a hiatus of a cent...

Cattle (Bos taurus) are biologically able to breed year-round, potentially giving farmers the freedom to choose a calving strategy to best meet their economic goals. Thus, an accurate method to determine cattle birth seasonality from archaeological remains would prove to be a valuable tool when investigating a prehistoric farming community. This pa...

Tephra layers can form useful age-equivalent stratigraphic markers for correlating palaeoenvironmental sequences and they provide information about the spatio-temporal nature of past volcanic ash fall events. The use of microscopic ‘cryptotephra’ layers has both increased the stratigraphic resolution of tephra sequences in proximal areas and extend...

We report on the earliest archaeological evidence from the Faroe Islands, placing human colonization in the 4th-6th centuries AD, at least 300-500 years earlier than previously demonstrated archaeologically. The evidence consists of an extensive wind-blown sand deposit containing patches of burnt peat ash of anthropogenic origin. Samples of carboni...

This paper presents new evidence to challenge the accepted view that both the house mouse Mus musculus domesticus and the field mouse Apodemus sylvaticus were introduced to Shetland by the Vikings. Archaeological remains of both Mus and Apodemus have been recovered from the site of Old Scatness Broch. While both mice were present in deposits dating...

The cemetery at Heath Wood, Ingleby, Derbyshire, is the only known Scandinavian cremation cemetery in the British Isles. It comprises fifty-nine barrows, of which about one-third have been excavated on previous occasions, although earlier excavators concluded that some were empty cenotaph mounds. From 1998 to 2000 three barrows were examined. Our i...

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In this paper, we illustrate the ways in which Bayesian statistical techniques may be used to enhance chronological resolution when applied to a series of OSL sediment dates. Such application can achieve an optimal chronological model by incorporating stratigraphic and age information. The application to luminescence data is not straightforward owi...

No The agricultural “revolution” in Iron Age Orkney is the subject of Julie Bond’s paper. Focusing on Pool in Sanday, she outlines the perceived changes in animal husbandry and cultivation over the lifetime of the settlement – changes she describes as “innovations and intensification in the agricultural economy of Orkney before the arrival of the V...

Many Anglo‐Saxon cremations contain some animal bone from funeral offerings, but often this material is not systematically identified or studied. This means that an important bias is present in the study of grave goods from most English cremation cemeteries, and that an important data set, which could offer insights into a people's view of life and...

An integrated survey and research excavation of a multiperiod settlement mound at Scatness, Shetland, was carried out in 1995. This settlement mound contains an Iron Age tower, known as a Broch, and 3 m or more of stratified archaeological deposits, truncated by a modern road. The paper explores the combined use of three-dimensional topographical s...

This report outlines the results of excavations carried out at Sancton I (Humberside, formerly East Riding, Yorkshire), the most northerly of a group of large, well-known Anglo-Saxon cremation cemeteries in eastern England. The excavations, undertaken by N. M. Reynolds1 for the then Department of Environment (now English Heritage), between 1976–80,...

ABSTRACT Evidence for Norse flax-growing is becoming more,apparent,in the archaeological record of Orkney. This paper, stimulated by new material from the excavations at Pool, island of Sunday, Orkney, examines the botany, cultivation and processing of flax and considers its value in early subsistence economies. Flax is traditionallyheld to have be...

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No Tofts Ness is a peninsula at the north end of the Orcadian island of Sanday where mounds and banks represent a domestic landscape, marginal even in island terms, together with a funerary landscape. A combination of selective excavation and geophysical survey during 1985-8 revealed settlement and cultivation spanning Neolithic to Early Iron Age t...

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