That tower of Scottish prehistory—the broch

Abstract

We are pleased to publish here a major review of a subject which has been accepted as known about, basically, for so long. The hypotheses advanced are challenging. John Hedges is Director of the North of Scottand Archaeological Services, centred on Binscarth House, Orkney. This organization grew out of the work of MY Hedges and Professor Rmfrew at Quanterness in I972. It is largely funded through the Scottish Development Department and consists of a number of full-time freelance archaeologists, including Bernard Bell, whose Edinburgh M.A. dissertation involved a discussion of iron age studies in Scottish archaeology.

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

“…The generalized cross-section" 6 shows this ditch with the Phase 3 deposits immediately underneath the much later recut ditch of Phase 7, so one must hope that the quernstone nearby was found in well-stratified, undisturbed material and had not slipped down from a later 'Broch 2' level when rotary querns were numerous. It is however difficult to assess the security of this find from the published account alone.…”

“…The history of the site is well summarized in the report' 6 where each of the eight phases distinguished is shown in the form of a site plan ( fig. 1).…”

“…The results from the former site gave Hedges the chance and the motivation to reassess the nature of the Orcadian Iron Age and of brochs in general. 2 Eventually a dual report appeared in which Bu was published in detail and Gurness broch, excavated in the 1930s, was published in as much detail as possible for the first time, the 'conventional' view of Scottish brochs was challenged and an alternative interpretation proposed. 3 This maintained that the massive stone broch towers of the Orkney middle Iron Age -of which as many as 700 may have been built all over Atlantic Scotland between about 200-50 BC and perhaps AD 100, and used for possibly a further two centuries (or more) -had their origins locally in thinner-walled early Iron Age roundhouses like Quanterness and Pierowall, and in the more massive structure at Bu; they were not imported from the Hebrides in the first century BC, where they had developed as one result of a short phase of intense foreign contacts, as the present writer has argued for many years.…”

“…The results of this work were outlined in style two years later. 6 This was the largest and costliest rescue excavation undertaken until that time by the then Scottish Development Department and it marked an entirely new phase in Iron Age archaeology in Orkney. For the first time a multi-period site -comparable to Jarlshof and Clickhimin in Shetland 7 -was examined in painstaking detail with all the resources Scottish Office had available.…”

Gurness and Midhowe brochs in Orkney: some problems of misinterpretation

“…Bu RouNDHousE, ORKNEY Since the late 1960s however, as recently explained (MacKie 1992, 157), several low structures with broch-like proportions have been identified in the northern part of the Atlantic province at least one of which, Bu in Orkney, has been dated by radiocarbon and by the associated material culture to the early Iron Age. An important feature of Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 04:45 22 June 2016 this last site is the layout of the interior which did not show any signs of the wooden roundhouse with an upper floor found inside hollow-walled brochs-namely the ring oflarge post-holes and the scarcement ledge on the inner wallface (to support the upper floor) (Hedges and Bell 1980;Hedges I987, vol. I).…”