Dig Diary – Time Team back on site filming the story of the Ness

Day Thirty-Four
Tuesday, August 6, 2024

Another beautiful, busy day and best of all a productive one!

So we’ll launch straight into the archaeology with Structure Twelve.

Working in the north-western recess, Sara has been untangling a series of features adjacent to the northern pier. Finds in the building’s northern end have been fairly scarce this season, but she made up for it today with a handsome worked stone tool.

Ness followers will be familiar with multi-hollow cobble tools – cuboid artefacts with a varying number of shaped hollows on the different faces.

Study the indentations and you can see the evidence of prolonged hammering, striking and grinding. These were heavily used work tools.

Sara’s tool isn’t multi-hollowed but has a single indentation on what was presumably the upper face. However, it was beautifully crafted from granite and carefully flattened at its bottom to provide a stable base for its use.

Undoubtedly one of the finest examples found to date.

Next door to Sara, working in Twelve’s north end, Sigurd reached full circle today.

Back in July 2021, he began excavating what was thought to be a pit relating to the collapse of the mega-drain running across the trench from Twelve to Structure Ten.

The upper layers of the pit produced some well-preserved animal bone as well as sherds from the base of a very large Grooved Ware vessel.

He didn’t spend long in the area, however. The joy of archaeological contexts meant that he had to follow the sequence of the many, many deposits overlying the suspected pit.

This saw him gradually move eastwards, then north and back westwards towards the north-western corner alcove.

And now, three years later, he’s back in the original “pit”.

It’s early days, but it might be that we have evidence of a passageway from the north-western entrance into the building – a passageway akin to that which ran from the eastern entrance and divided the interior of Twelve into two “rooms”.

We’ll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, in the annexe outside Twelve’s eastern entrance, supervisor Jim enlisted some assistance this afternoon to safely remove the huge quernstone that formed the rear of the paved south-eastern alcove.

Now, we’ll jump across to Structure Seventeen, one of Eight’s predecessors, where Ceiridwen found not one but three artefacts – including a rather fine decorated stone.

Her first find was a spatula-type tool in the building’s northern end recess…

It was followed by something rare at the Ness – a shell! On first glance it appears to have been perforated, but its condition suggests it might just be degraded…

And last, but not least,was the stone with a deeply incised band of geometric decoration…

Meanwhile, west of Structures Eight, Seventeen and Eighteen, Vicky, Becca, Sophie and Aden were set to work in the area between them and Structure Sixteen – a small building directly opposite Fourteen’s south-eastern entrance.

Little remained of Sixteen but, like House Nine at Barnhouse, it seems to have been an outbuilding associated with the activities in Fourteen.

The paved area running between Structures Seventeen and Eighteen may continue between Eighteen and Sixteen, so the goal of the new “16-team” is to clarify the relationship between Sixteen, Eight and its predecessors.

On the subject of earlier buildings, work on Structure Forty – the earlier building beneath One’s northern end – continues. And now we have one of its drains. And who doesn’t love a good drain!

Meanwhile, at the other end of the site, the enigma of Structure Twenty-Seven’s hearth took a new turn today.

We’ve mentioned the shallow ash within the upper level of the hearth before. It was less than an inch deep, which suggested the building was only used for a short period or time. Or was it being meticulously emptied regularly?

Beneath the ash was a series of stone layers but, as yet, we have no evidence of earlier burning. But today, beneath what appears to be a levelling later for the overlying stone slab, we have an intriguing deposit.

It contained a lot of mineralised brushwood, along with animal bone and teeth. What does it represent? The next stage is to clean it up and investigate further.

There’s no doubt that fans of Time Team would have noticed the presence of geophysicist John Gater on site today.

John is an old friend of site director Nick, both having worked at the Pool and Toftsness excavations in Sanday, Orkney, in the 1980s, and, more recently, when Nick was a researcher at the University of Bradford.

He was also responsible for the initial phase of the geophysical surveys of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage site.

John and Time Team producer/camerawoman Emily Hughes will be on site for the next two weeks, producing a programme looking at the story of the Ness, which will be available next year.

And with that news, we’ll leave it there for now.

Tomorrow’s weather forecast is not looking promising but, ever the optimists, we’re keeping our fingers crossed.

If not, then it’s back to the paperwork…