Skara Brae and the Heart of Neolithic Orkney

Skara Brae is the best lesson in archaeological humility in Britain, and the lesson is about confidence rather than about religion.

A storm stripped the turf from the knoll at the Bay of Skaill in 1850 and the landowner, William Watt, dug into what it exposed, stopping in 1868. V. Gordon Childe, among the most influential prehistorians of the twentieth century, excavated around 1930 and concluded the village dated to roughly 500 BC. Radiocarbon dating in the early 1970s put the occupation between about 3180 and 2500 BC. He was wrong by some twenty-seven centuries, working carefully, with the best comparative method available, and in good faith. Every confident functional claim about a prehistoric site should be read with that number in mind.

The village itself is a settlement and not a sanctuary, and this entry says so because it is regularly presented otherwise. Eight houses were sunk into midden for insulation and linked by covered passages, each with a central hearth, box beds and a shelved stone dresser facing the door. The furniture survives because Orkney sandstone splits into usable slabs and the islands had almost no timber, so what would elsewhere have been wooden is stone. Nothing excavated there identifies a deity, a priesthood, or a building set apart for worship.

The religious weight of Neolithic Orkney sits a few miles inland, in a landscape where the Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar, the large complex on the Ness of Brodgar and the chambered cairn of Maeshowe stand within sight of one another between two lochs. Maeshowe is the one with an unambiguous alignment: it is built so that for some days around the midwinter solstice the light of the setting sun travels the length of the entrance passage and falls on the rear wall of the chamber.

Maeshowe also carries the best graffiti in northern Europe. Norsemen broke into it in the twelfth century and cut more than thirty runic inscriptions into the walls, the largest such collection anywhere from a single site. They are boasts, names, a claim about treasure carried off, and remarks about women. There is nothing liturgical in them, which is itself informative about what a Norse raiding party thought it had walked into. The chamber was opened again in 1861 by the antiquarian James Farrer, who came in through the roof and emptied it.

Two cautions. The Ness of Brodgar, excavated from 2003 to 2024, is routinely called a temple complex in press coverage; its excavators have not claimed that. And the standing threat to Skara Brae is the sea, an assessment in 2019 warned that a single severe storm could remove part of it.

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.