Dig deep to fund Mull excavation
Crowdfunders on Mull need £5,000 towards funding a follow-up dig after the discovery of a Norse settlement, writes Kathie Griffiths.
Mull Museum hopes supporters will give generously to its Justgiving page to pay for a further excavation later this year at Lephin, Glengorm they also hope to make enough to cover post-dig costs.
The appeal has smashed the £1,000 barrier so far and comes after exciting results from archaeologists’ efforts at the site in September 2018 and 2019.
Dates for this year are September 10-24 and volunteers are being invited to get hands-on – no experience necessary. Once again children from the six island schools will also be encouraged to actually dig in the trenches.
The project has won wide support from the community, teachers and archaeologists, as well as funding from Scottish Society of Antiquaries and the Mess project, which is part of Mull and Iona Community Trust and Mull Museum.
This year archaeologists hope the dig will be able to confirm whether there was more than one Norse period building at Lephin and what they may have looked like, what happened in them and around them. Those on the excavation also hope to find out for sure if the Norse farmstead was enclosed by some kind of wooden fence and what that might have looked like.
Although the same community team partially excavated a building from Norse times at Mull’s Baliscate, no other Norse settlement has been excavated in Argyll and only a handful of others have been uncovered across the Hebrides.
‘Lephin provides an exciting opportunity to understand how these farm settlements may have been laid out and how they worked. This site starts to add flesh to the bones of our understanding of Viking or Norse settlement in Argyll, which until now has only been presumed to have existed due to the high number of Scandinavia derived place names,’ said Mull Museum’s Hylda Marsh.
Near to Lephin are a couple of long mounds that could possibly be boat burials – they will also be explored during this year’s dig.
All money raised will go to the funding of the excavation and help pay the professional archaeologists, the analyses of finds, radiocarbon dating and writing up of the project. Go to www.justgiving.com/ crowdfunding/lephin2022.