Neolithic settlement at the woodland's edge: palynological data and timber architecture in Orkney, Scotland

Abstract

It has often been assumed that the islands of Orkney were essentially treeless throughout much of the Holocene‚ with any 'scrub' woodland having been destroyed by Neolithic farming communities by around 3500 cal. BC. This apparently open‚ hyper-oceanic environment would presumably have provided quite marginal conditions for human settlement‚ yet Neolithic communities flourished and the islands contain some of the most spectacular remains of this period in north-west Europe. The study of new Orcadian pollen sequences‚ in conjunction with the synthesis of existing data‚ indicates that the timing of woodland decline was not synchronous across the archipelago‚ beginning in the Mesolithic, and that in some areas woodland persisted into the Bronze Age. There is also evidence to suggest that woodland communities in Orkney were more diverse, and therefore that a wider range of resources was available to Neolithic people, than has previously been assumed. Recent archaeological investigations have revealed evidence for timber buildings at early Neolithic settlement sites‚ suggesting that the predominance of stone architecture in Neolithic Orkney may not have been due to a lack of timber as has been supposed. Rather than simply reflecting adaptation to resource constraints‚ the Farrell et al 2014 Journal of Archaeological Science DOI 10.1016/j.jas.2012 reasons behind the shift from timber to stone construction are more complex and encompass social, cultural and environmental factors.

Maps From Mud—Using the Multiple Scenario Approach to Reconstruct Land Cover Dynamics From Pollen Records: A Case Study of Two Neolithic Landscapes

“…The earliest Neolithic activity identified from archaeological dates was around 3800 cal BC, and land-cover was reconstructed for a series of 200-year intervals (referred to as "timeslices") over the period 4200-2000 cal BC. In contrast to the Somerset Moors and Levels, the landscape of Orkney is generally understood to have been largely or entirely treeless during the Neolithic (e.g., Davidson and Jones, 1985), though paleoenvironmental work suggests that occasional stands of woodland were present into the Bronze Age (Farrell et al, 2014). The wealth of Neolithic archaeological remains in Orkney also contrasts with the Somerset case study, with wellpreserved settlements, tombs and monuments still dominating the landscape in many places even today.…”

“…There is an increase in coverage of the "disturbed ground" community and a reduction in woodland cover, but woodland does not disappear from the landscape entirely. Woodland would have been a valuable resource for Neolithic Orcadians (Farrell et al, 2014), and was already scarce (Figures 3, 4) at the time of the first dated settlement activity (3600-3400 cal BC timeslice), and falls by around 50% between the 3400-3200 cal BC timeslice and the 3200-3000 cal BC one, suggesting that some loss of woodland occurred with the first dated Neolithic activity in the area. The clear coincidence between changes in land cover and settlement occupation, dated using the same age model construction approach but independent sets of radiocarbon dates, suggests that land cover reconstruction using the MSA may provide a proxy for settlement activity even in landscapes where impacts are expected to have been small scale.…”

Later prehistoric vegetation dynamics and Bronze Age agriculture at Hobbister, Orkney, Scotland

“…Other pollen records from Mainland (Davidson et al 1976;de la Vega-Leinert et al 2007) are thought to include the Bronze Age, but only the earlier parts of the profiles are radiocarbon dated so there is no firm evidence to confirm this interpretation. The period may also be covered by a short profile recovered from a Bronze Age archaeological site on South Ronaldsay (Bartlett 1983), but the sequence is dated only by biostratigraphy, which has been shown to be inconsistent in Orkney (Farrell et al 2014). Other putatively Bronze Age records are either poorly dated (e.g.…”

“…; Keatinge and Dickson 1979;Bunting 1994Bunting , 1996Blackford et al 1996; de la Vega- There is a long-held assumption that Orkney's woodland was almost entirely cleared to provide land for agriculture within a few hundred years of the onset of the Neolithic (Davidson and Jones 1985;Tipping 1994;Dickson 2000), but it is clear that woodland decline did not occur synchronously across the islands, and variations in timing of this event suggest that it resulted from complex interactions between local climatic conditions and pedological and anthropogenic factors that varied between sites (Farrell et al 2014). The cause of the first woodland decline at Hobbister at ca.…”

“…4730 cal BC is unclear. Mesolithic human disturbance has been invoked as the cause of temporary woodland declines on Hoy (Blackford et al 1996) and in west Mainland (Bunting 1994 (Farrell et al 2014), and is likely to have been at least partly responsible for the second episode of woodland loss at Hobbister.…”