Neolithic ‘dressers’ – was there more to them than just a set of shelves?

Friday, April 25, 2025 (12:41 PM)

“A curious feature which is found in [Skara Brae’s] chambers three and six is an arrangement of two stone shelves, erected one above the other and abutting against one of the stone walls. They remind one of double berths in a ship, but they were used, more probably, for storing pottery utensils in, when not in use, and Professor Childe’s descriptive term – ‘dresser’ – is probably not very wide of the mark.”

Hugh Marwick. Skerrabrae. (1928)

By Sigurd Towrie

The years since Skara Brae’s excavation have seen much debate over the role, and significance, of the so-called “dressers” – the stone furniture features that have become icons for the Neolithic settlement.

Built to the same design and placed in the same position – directly opposite the entrance – these substantial “shelves” were fashioned from large, stone slabs supported by uprights. But were they, as the early excavators suggested, merely storage units? Or was there more to them?

“[T]here is plenty of speculation as to their significance. Some suggest a role as household shrines, while others emphasise the more mundane storage of food and other materials; it depends on what you bring to the interpretation.

“Drawing the eye when you came in through the door, dressers may have served like mantelpieces, useful shelves that were sometimes also home to things that mattered, objects of reverence and those that helped you to remember; heirlooms and gifts, an old arrowhead found while out watching the beasts.” [1]

The issue was brought to the fore following the discovery and excavation of the Barnhouse settlement in the 1980s. Among the typical dwellings at this lochside site was a massive, later building – Structure Eight.

Constructed around 2900BC, after the settlement had been abandoned, Eight was a large, hall-like building with incredibly thick outer walls. Although, at eight square metres, the interior of Structure Eight was not much bigger than House One at Skara Brae, the sum of its parts placed the building firmly in the monumental category.

It stood on a large, carefully constructed platform of yellow clay and was surrounded by a substantial enclosing wall that formed an internal courtyard 20 metres across. These elements not only linked the building to the chambered cairn of Maeshowe but gave it a spatial layout closely resembling that of the nearby Stones of Stenness.

From the archaeological evidence it is clear that Structure Eight was not a “domestic” building in the generally understood sense. But it did contain a “dresser”. One that did not last the lifetime of the building but was dismantled and replaced by a large, stone-built box.

It seems that whatever the original significance of this “dresser”, something changed. And this resurrected the notion there was more to the stone features than met the eye.

The dresser of House One at Skara Brae from the doorway. (📷 Sigurd Towrie)

Fast forward to the early 21st century and the discovery of the Ness of Brodgar complex.

Like Barnhouse’s Structure Eight, Structure Ten at the Ness was raised around 2900BC, but on an even more monumental scale. Measuring 25 metres long by 20 metres wide, its four-metre-thick walls survived to a height of approximately one metre.

Ten’s inner chamber was again reminiscent of Maeshowe, but larger, and its scale and elaborate architecture, together with the excavation evidence, showed this was no dwelling.

But again, Structure Ten had “dressers”!

Structure Ten's original phase with the remains of the dresser directly opposite the entrance. — Structure Ten’s original phase with the remains of the dresser directly opposite the entrance.

In its original form, Structure Ten’s “dresser” was directly opposite the entrance.

Following a collapse, the building’s rebuilding/remodelling around 2800BC saw this “dresser” replaced by a more elaborate, heavily decorated version – one that incorporated decorated stone and dressed slabs of striking red and yellow sandstone – probably material reused from Ten’s primary phase and that had been brought to the site specifically for its construction.

But unlike those visible at Skara Brae, where they were built against the walls in the later dwellings, Ten’s dresser was free-standing, a drystone wall defining its rear.

Only two of the excavated piered buildings at the Ness (c.3100BC) produced evidence of possible “dressers” – one in Structure Fourteen and another perhaps in the 20-metre-long Structure Eight. In both cases they were located in the end recess, directly opposite an entrance.

The location of the stone furniture features in Structure Five. (📷 Tom O’Brien)

And then there was Structure Five!

Dating from c.3300BC, Five was the earliest excavated building on site. In the exposed section of its primary phase were the remains of eight stone furniture features lining the inner walls. The upper sections were long gone, making interpretation difficult but, in 2022, it was suggested at least some might be variants of Skara Brae-type “dressers”.

Considering the non-domestic role of Structure Ten, it was considered likely that these “dressers” had a function beyond storage or display. However, this raised the question of why Structure Five had at least eight!

The stone features along the interior of Structure Five's original north wall. (Sigurd Towrie) — 2022: The remains of one of Structure Five’s ‘dressers’ – this one positioned against the interior of the original north-eastern wall. (📷 Sigurd Towrie)

What the constructions in Five represented remains open to debate. The north-eastern feature, for example, extended across most of the width of the building. Was this a bench akin to those encountered in stalled cairns? But one for the living?

Whatever their role, the presence of beautiful stone tools, buried in the clay floor next to each dismantled “dresser”, strongly suggested they were considered special to the building’s users.

A typical dresser at Skara Brae, with Professor Dame Mary Beard to give an idea of their size. (📷 Sigurd Towrie) — A typical dresser at Skara Brae. My thanks to Professor Dame Mary Beard, who gives an idea of their scale. (📷 Sigurd Towrie)

While investigations at the Ness were onging, at Westray’s Links of Noltland the excavators found “dressers” in two areas of Neolithic activity. Like the earlier houses at Skara Brae, the “dresser” in Structure Seven at the Links had been built into a wall recess opposite the entrance [2]. The “Grobust House”, in comparison, had no dresser but had a shelved recess directly opposite the entrance.[3]

Childe's 1928 schematic of House Seven at Skara Brae. — Childe’s 1928 schematic of House Seven at Skara Brae.

These discoveries were enough to reignite the debate and question the weight carried by the word “dresser” – a term coined by Vere Gordon Childe during his early 20th century excavations at Skara Brae:

“Built against the rear wall, in the centre, was a two-storeyed erection of stone slabs, resembling a dresser.” [4]

From 1928 to 1932, Childe applied “dresser” to the stone features encountered at the rear of the dwellings – despite stating that “no relics found in these structures give any clue to their function”. [5]

At the same time, he cemented the notion that, although not very long, the stone boxes on either side of the central hearth were beds, despite no evidence for that function.

Before he settled on “beds”, and as you will see from the 1928 illustration above, the term “sty” was used, because Childe firmly believed the villagers lived in squalor:

“Even the beds were no cleaner; the complete skull of a calf lay in the left-hand bed.” [5]

These days Childe’s interpretations are widely accepted as indisputable fact rather than assumptions.

The interior of House One, Skara Brae, with the 'beds' visible on either side of the central hearth. (📷 Sigurd Towrie) — The interior of House One, Skara Brae, with the ‘beds’ visible on either side of the central hearth. (📷 Sigurd Towrie)

As Professors Jane Downes and Colin Richards put it:

“While, images of snug, straw- or hide-lined beds may appeal to our view of domesticity in the past, there seems little evidence to support the belief that both left- and right-hand stone boxes performed the same role, let alone acted as beds for individual men and women.” [6]

They added:

“[T]he same caution should be given to the label of ‘dresser’ as that of ‘beds’; language shapes understanding and the maintenance of such labels supresses other possibilities in the same way that it restricts change. Just consider the difference the term ‘altar’ would have had on understanding the Skara Brae houses if Childe had decided on an alternative label.” [6]

This is backed up by centuries of excavation, which strongly suggests that Neolithic architecture was imbued with meaning. This was probably a society where there was no distinction between “religion” and daily, domestic life.

3d model of the interior of House One, Skara Brae. (📷 Hugo Anderson-Whymark)

With houses it seems there was a special significance attached to the rear – the innermost area – of the dwelling. In the Late Neolithic this was perhaps marked by the construction of the “dressers”. [7]

That said, just because they may have had symbolic significance does not mean “dressers” were not used to display or storing certain items. It is perhaps no coincidence that two of the finest polished stone axes found at the Ness came from the area around Structure Ten’s “dresser”:

“It is clear that the rear shelving is highly visible on entry to the house because it is elevated and faces the entrance. Structurally, it is in the deepest space of the house being located at the rear. There is also little doubt of its role as shelving for the display or containment of objects, but such objects could range from a pottery vessel to ancestral skull.

“Perhaps, given its position at the rear of the house, the ‘dresser’ could have embodied particular beliefs, in much the same way as is argued for the hearth.” [6]

If that were the case, it may be that the rear cells encountered in earlier Neolithic dwellings were a precursor to the later “dressers” – sacred, or special, areas that “endured, developing into the ‘dressers’ or house altars…” [7]

And those special areas were perhaps the evolution of an architectural feature noted in the earliest stalled cairns, such as Midhowe and Unstan.

The end compartment at Midhowe, Rousay. (📷 Sigurd Towrie)

The end chamber within the Midhowe stalled cairn, Rousay. (📷 Sigurd Towrie)

Within these “tombs” pairs of orthostats, projecting from the inner walls, created stone-lined pathways that terminated at shelved compartments dominated by massive backslabs against the end walls.

The end cells, it has been argued, represented the final destination for those placed within the structures. And those visiting:

“Indeed, the tomb is, in some ways, no more than a covered pathway through a series of doorways to the ultimate goal; a symbol of the divine or an impassable gateway to another world?” [8]

To Professor Colin Richards, the innermost compartments, and their backslabs, represented “the doorway to immortality and another world, the door to which is always closed to humanity.” [8]

That the stalled cairn end compartments may be linked to the rear cells found in early dwellings comes as no surprise. The switch from timber to stone buildings, around 3300BC, replicated the architecture of the only stone structures erected by this time, stalled cairns:

“With the advent of stone houses, the materiality and architecture of house and tomb now merge.” [9]

House One, Skara Brae. (📷 Sigurd Towrie)

How these “special” areas, and the meaning attached to them, developed over the centuries is not known, but the cases where “dressers” were replaced suggests it was an ongoing process.

We also need to move away from the notion that “dressers” were standard fixtures in all Late Neolithic architecture. It is now clear that they were not features in all dwellings, e.g. House Seven at Barnhouse.

The fact they are absent from some houses but can be found in monumental, non-domestic structures adds to the mystery.

To Professor Mike Parker Pearson, the inclusion of a “dresser” was perhaps a mark of status.

During a visit to the Ness of Brodgar excavation in 2010, fresh from his work at the Durrington Walls settlement in Wiltshire, England, he told me:

“We’ve always seen these ‘dressers’ as simple everyday objects – ‘every Neolithic house has a dresser’. But in fact, they don’t. This came home to me a couple of summers ago with our houses at Durrington Walls, because only one had the footings for a dresser. In all the others there was no trace of a dresser at all.

“At Durrington Walls, the building with the dresser was the biggest of the houses, and this made me realise that we’ve likely got architectural and social differences between them.

“So, the possession of a dresser, in the south at least, was something that only certain houses have — houses, belonging to people somewhere up the pecking order. That may have all sorts of connotations to do with family seniority.”

Bearing all of this in mind, it is maybe time that we moved away from the idea that we are seeing a simple case of “Oh, we’ll just stick up some shelves here.”

Sunset over House One, Skara Brae. (📷 Sigurd Towrie)

Notes

[1] Edmonds, M. (2019) Orcadia: Land, Sea and Stone in Neolithic Orkney. Bloomsbury Publishing.
[2] Moore, H. & Wilson,G. (2011). Shifting Sands, Links of Noltland, Westray: Interim report on Neolithic and Bronze Age Excavations, 2007-2009 (Archaeology Report, 4). Historic Scotland.
[3] Moore, H. and Wilson, G. (2013) Sands of Time: Domestic Rituals at the Links of Noltland. Current Archaeology.
[4] Childe, V.G. (1928) A Prehistoric Village: Traces of Human Sacrifice. Letter to The Glasgow Herald. September 3, 1928
[5] Childe, V. G. (1931). Skara Brae: a Pictish village in Orkney. Kegan Paul: London.
[6] Downes, J. and Richards, C. (2005) The Dwellings at Barnhouse. In Richards, C. (ed) Dwelling among the monuments: the Neolithic village of Barnhouse, Maeshowe passage grave and surrounding monuments at Stenness. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. pp. 57-127.
[7] Downes, J., Sharman, P., Challands, A., Guttman-Bond, E., McKenzie, J., Towers, R. and Voke, P.D. (2016). Place in the Past: an early Neolithic house at the Knowes of Trotty barrow cemetery, Harray, Mainland, Orkney. In Richards, C. and Jones R. (eds) The Development of Neolithic House Societies in Orkney. pp.41-63. Oxbow: Oxford.
[8] Richards, C. (1993) An Archaeological Study of Neolithic Orkney: Architecture, Order and Social Order.
[9] Richards, C., Downes, J., Gee, C. and Carter, S. (2016) Materialising Neolithic House Societies in Orkney. In Richards, C. and Jones, R. (eds) The Development of Neolithic House Societies in Orkney: Investigations in the Bay of Firth, Mainland, Orkney (1994–2014). Oxford: Windgather Press, 224-253.