We’re back on site! Time Team dig plans confirmed for 2026
By Nick Card
Life is full of surprises!
Just when I thought my trowel had been hung up for good (my second-best trowel, as the first was buried in the backfill of Trench P) and my digging jeans committed to the rubbish, it looks as if I will have to re-excavate them.
As you will all be aware, 2024 saw the official end of excavation and the trenches all backfilled. However, this summer we undertook a further phase of work, revisiting our earlier geophysical survey across the site with the latest technology to hopefully add further definition to the Ness complex.
We also felt it was a fitting end to the fieldwork at the Ness, to sandwich the excavation between the initial geophysical survey undertaken by John Gater back in 2002, that helped to identify the site, and a final season of geophysics to complement the excavated results and act as a fitting conclusion to the filming undertaken by Time Team in 2024 (due for release in early 2026).
Over the last 20 years techniques and data processing have came on in leaps and bounds so we were not overly surprised that the magnetometry and resistance techniques we re-employed provided much clearer results and defined certain features much more clearly.
The big surprise came with the deployment of Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) a technique we had previously only used on a very limited basis due to the labour-intensive nature of the kit we had in the past. Recent developments this time allowed us survey the whole site in a matter of a few days thanks due to the involvement once again of John Gater of Time Team and SUMO GeoServices, and Mike Langton of Guideline Geo.
State of the art equipment, never before used in Scotland, was dragged behind a quad bike allowing gigabytes of data (some 2 billion data points!) to be quickly gathered across the site.
Unlike the magnetometry and resistance surveys, which basically provide a two-dimensional plan of the site, the GPR produces time slices every six centimetres in depth across the site that can be stitched together in post processing to produce a 3D model of the underlying archaeology. Exciting!
This will allow us to get a better understanding of the development of the site over time especially in the unexcavated areas. Full analysis of the GPR results is still ongoing.
As you’ll see in the photo of a sneak peek at Time Team’s initial GPR results the results threw up quite a few surprises but one in particular was unexpected to say the least! A form of the feature that seems totally at odds with what we are used to seeing at the Ness – a site that can seen to be defined by straight lines and rectangular forms, from the architecture down to the art.
Whatever it turns out to be, this is an exciting discovery, evidence for potentially a hitherto unknown chapter in the story of the Ness, and worth pursuing through limited small-scale excavation.
So what we intend to do, with funding provided by Time Team, is open a small trench to investigate this anomaly – yes more excavation!
The well-defined, discrete nature of this feature we hope means that, unlike the rest of the Ness, we are dealing with relatively simple, single-phase archaeology that can be easily dealt with and completed within four weeks. So we propose to be back on site in July 2026 with a small team of diggers (which is already in place and we will not be requiring volunteers), with input and filming by Time Team.
As in previous years the excavation will be open to the public, but please don’t expect to see the type of archaeology you have seen in the past, something a bit different! Please also note, to avoid any disappointment, that the buildings previously on show will remain covered and will not visible.
Excavation will also prove invaluable to ground-truth the GPR results and assist in the interpretation of the rest of the data not just for the Ness but globally.
Watch this space. As they say, never say never!
The Ness project is run by the Ness of Brodgar Trust in partnership with the UHI Archaeology Institute.
