Free online talk on Neolithic carved stone balls
The Ness of Brodgar carved stone ball in situ within Structure Ten in 2013. (ORCA)
Next Friday afternoon, March 26, Dr Hugo Anderson-Whymark will present an online seminar outlining the most recent research on prehistoric carved stone balls.
The talk, the latest in the University of the Highlands and Islands monthly seminars, is entitled Rethinking Scotland’s Neolithic Carved Stone Balls.
Hugo will be familiar to anyone who has visited the Ness excavation site in the past and is a senior curator of prehistory at the National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh, and a visiting reader at the University of the Highlands and Islands Archaeology Institute.
Carved stone balls are one of Scotland’s most enigmatic prehistoric artefacts. Created some 5,000 years ago, during the Late Neolithic, their distinctive knobbed forms were carefully “pecked” and ground to shape by communities across the north-east of Scotland.
A new programme at National Museums Scotland is revisiting carved stone balls with a programme of archive digitisation and 3d modelling and the talk explores some preliminary results and focuses on examples found in Orkney.
Rethinking Scotland’s Neolithic Carved Stone Balls takes place on Friday, March 26, at 4pm (GMT). For more details, and to book a place, click here.
- Ness dig director Nick Card is putting the finishing touches on his latest presentation on the site and will be uploaded to the website as soon as he has finished.
