20 years of discoveries – Nick at the Current Archaeology Live! conference
Site director Nick Card was the keynote speaker at the 2025 Current Archaeology Live! conference in London at the weekend.
The annual one-day event brings together archaeologists to outline the latest discoveries and research from Britain and beyond. With a record attendance this year, Nick’s talk, The Ness of Brodgar: a millennium in the making; 20 years of discovery, was delivered to an audience of around 600 people.
Among the Ness stalwarts in attendance was Jo Bourne, who sent this report.
Saturday, March 1, saw a capacity audience at the Logan Hall, University College London, for the Current Archaeology Live! conference.
The conference featured a packed and wide-ranging programme that included presentations on The origins of agriculture and the culture of the oven, by Professor Dorian Fuller (UCL), revealing how 21st century kitchens around the world are influenced by the oven styles from prehistory; The Sun, Moon, and the monuments of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site, by Dr Amanda Chadburn (Bournemouth University), covering new studies on sightlines and alignments of Stonehenge, and Klein Hollandia: discovering a British “act of piracy”, by Mark Beattie-Edwards (Nautical Archaeological Society), chronicling the dives to record this 17th century shipwreck.
The keynote speech was delivered by Nick Card, who was named Archaeologist of the Year 2024 at last year’s CA Live!
The Ness of Brodgar – a Millenium in the Making; 20 Years of Discovery traced the excavations from the discovery of the Brodgar Stone in 1925, through the geophysics to the excavations from 2004 to 2024.
Nick spoke of the evolution of the architecture over the 50 generations of the Ness’s use, from wooden buildings to monumental stone-roofed structures; the complexity of the buildings: Structure Ten, for example, having 25 different phases and sub-phases; and the final decommissioning of some of the buildings with extraordinary feasts of cattle, as evidenced by the many thousands of bones found around them.
He talked of the extraordinary finds, from drains to incised stones, and even a plank likely from the wooden roof frame of Structure Twenty-Seven.
With the site backfilled in 2024, he discussed the post-excavation phase of the work now under way, including the study of a metric tonne of pottery from all phases of the Neolithic.
Such work has much to reveal, for instance the fingerprint analysis already undertaken by Kent Fowler, Director of the University of Manitoba’s Ceramic Technology Laboratory in Winnipeg, that suggests that pot manufacture was a male-dominated industry.
Nick concluded that the Ness, the hub of a very special landscape, was a gathering place in the past, emphasising its extraordinary beauty for the audience with a photograph by Kieran Dodds of a rare triple rainbow taken during the backfilling.
The talk was the highlight of a fascinating conference, showing the incredible depth and breadth of archaeology in Britain today.
Several members of the Ness team were in the audience, from excavators to the finds team, and enjoyed catching up over the course of the day.
