Evolution of an excavation – the Ness dig year by year
It is now just over 17 years since the discovery of the Ness of Brodgar complex and 2020 will be the first time since 2003 that no excavation will take place on site. So...
Category: Excavation
Archive views – around the trenches in 2007
A cache of long-lost photographs from 2007, showing Trench J, (which was re-opened and extended in 2018), Trench M (opened to examine the extent of the “Great Wall of Brodgar“) and Trench P. It’s...
Ness flanked by lochs in prehistory? Surveys suggest otherwise
Standing on the Ness of Brodgar, you can see why the peninsula was chosen to site some of the best-known ceremonial monuments of the Orcadian Neolithic. The Ness sits at the centre of a...
Trench P from a cherry picker – August 2010
These days when we need a picture of the site from above, Professor Scott Pike sends up his drone. Back in 2010, “aerial” photographs relied on photographic towers or, in this case, a cherry...
2013 road work revealed structure beyond the ‘Great Wall’
Visitors to the Ness of Brodgar site are always staggered to learn that we have excavated less than ten per cent of the complex. The sheer scale of the Neolithic complex has become more...
Visitor information boards available to download
Each excavation season we have a series of information boards placed across the site for the benefit of the thousands of visitors we welcome each year. Unfortunately, this year we wont be on site,...
New additions to download archive
Two new PDFs are now available in our downloads archive. The first, Painting a picture of Neolithic Orkney: decorated stonework from the Ness of Brodgar, is a paper by dig director Nick Card and...
Clickable trench views now online
When it comes to the Ness, the sheer number of Neolithic structures can be a little daunting when reading about the archaeology. We’re currently sitting at 36 on site – the buildings are numbered...