Busy times! It’s a veritable research hot-house at the Ness dig HQ

Wednesday, May 15, 2024 (9:16 AM)

Lochview. Ness dig HQ. (📷 Sigurd Towrie)

By Anne Mitchell

It’s turned into an exceptionally busy week here at Brodgar. Is it because spring temperatures have made the house comfortable to work in (it can be dashed cold here in the winter!) or that it’s only six weeks till we open up the Ness again and everyone’s keen to get things done?

Whichever the answer, this week dig HQ is full of ongoing research. And that’s a very good thing.

In a backroom, full of boxes of worked stone and incised stone, Cameron is busy working on his PhD, Neolithic Narratives, examining storytelling methodologies, tools, and technologies for enriching visitor engagement with prehistory.

He’s talking to us, the Ness Team, Mark, Nick, Sigurd, myself, examining how we tell our story to all of you.

Meanwhile Sarah is tucked away in a room with a view out over the site and in the distance, the Ring of Brodgar.

She’s starting work on pottery from Structure Twelve, continuing the work done over the winter by Annabel and Kathy.

Sarah and Nick set up the camera for a ceramics photography session. (📷 Anne Mitchell)

Sarah is with us until late October and is working initially on a particular batch of seven boxes of pottery. Some of that will be photographed as she proceeds and here are Sarah and Nick trying to get the camera in position to take the best shots. Not easy!

Jonni is sharing space with Jan, our ceramics specialist, and is currently under way with her UHI Archaeology Institute MLitt dissertation, cataloguing, photographing, making observations of the Ness assemblage of mini pots.

Small, but perfectly formed. A thumb pot recovered from inside Structure Nineteen in 2022. (📷 Jo Bourne)

Fresh from the trench. Chris' two-centimetre-diameter thumb pot. (📷 Sigurd Towrie)

A closer view of Gianluca's thumb-pot. (Sigurd Towrie)

The second tiny thumpot this week - once again from the vicinity of Structure Nineteen. (Sigurd Towrie)

Structure Nineteen thumb pot. (📷 Sigurd Towrie)

We have 42 of these tiny pots – some complete, some fragments.

They are sometimes simple thumb pots, but sometimes miniature replicas of much bigger Grooved Ware vessels. We don’t know what they were for and Jonni’s work, including sorting out where on the site they came from and within which phase (time frame) they were deposited, are all valuable first steps towards an understanding of these tiny beauties.

UHI Archaeology Institute MLitt student Jonni examining Ness thumbpots. (📷 Anne Mitchell)

Jan is working with Jonni and Sarah and proceeding through the Structure Twelve pottery, adding specialist detail to the cataloguing being done by Sarah. The Ness pottery assemblage is huge, as we’ve told you many times before, and we need to throw many hands, and heads, at it.

Gary is out in one of the site huts examining worked stone… or is it?

Gary's boxes of stone. Worked or unworked? (📷 Anne Mitchell) — Gary’s boxes of stone. Worked or unworked? (📷 Anne Mitchell)

Over the years we’ve amassed a collection of stone from the Ness, which has been bagged and recorded because it apparently was used.

It doesn’t, however, fall obviously into any of the stone tool categories so further work is needed. And Gary is the lucky specialist to start the process.

I envy him greatly and you may find me missing from my desk a lot over the next few weeks, exploring these pieces with Gary. This is recreational activity for Gary before he starts his PhD research in the autumn, but it’s a task of great use to the Ness team.

Also squeezed also into the little house on the Ness are Nick and myself, preparing furiously for this year’s dig and working with the team here as surprises and questions arise.

It’s very fine to have them all here and a taster of what will come, when we stop digging in August, and fill our head and physical space with post-excavation research.