Skara Brae's stone furniture survived because sand buried it for thousands of years, and a storm is what finally gave it back.
Furniture that never rotted away
Because timber was scarce on Neolithic Orkney, the settlement's inhabitants built dressers, box beds and hearths directly from stone slabs rather than wood, and because the entire village was subsequently buried and sealed under sand, these stone furnishings survived intact in a way that wooden furniture at almost any comparable Neolithic site elsewhere would not have, giving Skara Brae an unusually direct, readable domestic layout.
Uncovered by a storm
A severe storm in 1850 stripped away the sand and turf that had covered the site for millennia, exposing part of the settlement's structure to the local landowner, who began early excavation shortly afterward, meaning the site's rediscovery came from weather rather than any deliberate archaeological search for it.
A date pushed back by better science
As this entry's companion article notes, the site's original chronology, proposed by the archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe, was substantially revised once radiocarbon dating became available, pushing the settlement's occupation earlier than Childe had estimated and repositioning Skara Brae's place within the wider timeline of Neolithic Orkney's monuments.