Continuity Over Three Thousand Years of Northern Prehistory: The ‘tel’ at Howe, Orkney

Abstract

The excavation report of Howe, a multi-period prehistoric site in Orkney, appeared, in 1994 and is reviewed here in detail. The Iron Age levels revealed a series of stone roundhouses and broch-like buildings which – it is claimed – show the local development of these structures in the north. However the evidence for the nature of the structures concerned, and for the dating of the earlier ones, is not really clear enough to support this hypothesis, and the unstable site raises doubts about the primarily defensive nature of the structures. The large quantities of well stratified pottery and other finds have huge research potential, and the writer has undertaken some new work on the rotary querns. The remains of neolithic buildings – including two superimposed chambered cairns – were found underneath the Iron Age levels at the end of the excavations. Fresh fieldwork by the writer is described which suggests that the first tomb was linked to the winter solstice. Clear continuity with the orientation of the later structures can be seen, and it is possible that access to the neolithic structures in the Iron Age was retained by means of an underground chamber. The ceremonial purposes of the site at Howe throughout most of its life may thus have been seriously underestimated.

Excavations at Dun Ardtreck, Skye, in 1964 and 1965

“…Naturally, if the primarily defensive nature of brochs and allied structures is disputed and their role as status symbols is emphasized, the assumption that a form of selection for more efficient protection pushed their builders along a particular line of development can be down-graded or abandoned entirely, and many other motives introduced for the appearance of different designs which could then have appeared almost at random. Indeed there can be little doubt that occasionally a badly constructed, unstable, broch-like building was set up on an unsafe site for mainly ideological reasons, as at Howe in Orkney (MacKie 1998).…”

THE BROCH CULTURES OF ATLANTIC SCOTLAND. PART 2. THE MIDDLE IRON AGE: HIGH NOON AND DECLINEc.200 BC–AD 550

“…Nothing more clearly defines the start of the Middle Iron Age than the sudden appearance and rapid spread of the Atlantic rotary quern. One or two may have arrived earlier than about 250–200 BC (MacKie 1998, 26 ff.) but the vast majority appear with the new buildings; their complete absence from the pre‐broch levels at Clickhimin and Jarlshof confirms them as a Middle Iron Age phenomenon.…”