2024’s top finds – Skara Brae-type stone dish from Trench T

At the beginning of the 2024 season, all eyes were on Structure Twenty-Seven. The goal this year was to expose the building’s northern end and this required moving considerable quantities of the overlying midden.

Within the midden material removed from the top of the structure were some lovely finds, including pottery, flint and burnt animal bone. But Ray really hit the jackpot when he spotted, and recovered, a small, stone vessel with a deep inner “bowl”.

The artefact is strikingly similar to the “small, stone dish” found at Skara Brae in 1927 – one of a number of stone vessels found at the Sandwick Neolithic settlement.