2,000-year-old jewellery site
SCIENTISTS have shed light on an archaeological site in Orkney which may have turned out to be an ancient jewellers.
The Cairns dig, on a wild and wind-swept cliff above Windwick Bay in South Ronaldsay, is thought to have been where Iron Age jewellery makers honed their craft.
It has now become a research and training excavation for the University of the Highlands and Islands Archaeology Institute and has revealed many insights into ordinary life in Iron Age Orkney.
Radiocarbon dates available this week have provided archaeologists with a glimpse into a new episode in the life of the site nearly 2000 years ago, in the Middle to Late Iron Age.
The Cairns is known for the remains of an Iron Age broch but also increasingly for a post-broch metal working area.
A collection of 60 metal working moulds, remains of furnaces, crucibles and further evidence of considerable metal working were unearthed in 2017 – including high status jewellery objects such as bronze pins and brooches.
Additionally a huge midden of animal bones and broken pots lies adjacent and partly covers this metal-working area.
Radiocarbon analysis of the midden suggests that it was created in the AD240S to AD300S and further investigation of the deposits points to a great feast event being held on the spot at a time after the broch fell into disuse. This was a time of great social change in Northern Scotland and was contemporary to the mid and late Roman period further south.
Martin Carruthers, site director, said: “We may be looking at how the social structure of an evolving Iron Age society worked. Using jewellery-making and sharing at a large social event as a mechanism to unite a community and define a social hierarchy.”