... and not to a coffee morning!
This was an Orkney Archaeology Society talk last Tuesday. We've been life members of the OAS for about 3 decades and the OH was on the committee and for some of that time Membership Secretary for a good few years as well, but as time wore on we got a bit tired of it all. Archaeologists can be as snippy and argumentative as any other type of academic and lay people who are interested in archaeology can sometimes be very tedious. And I think when he gave up the committee and we got all the related paraphernalia out of the house we were so relieved we just withdrew for a bit. We hadn't stopped altogether, but it took something special to get us out of the house and turn up - especially in the evenings at this time of the year.
There again this talk was about something special. During the summer a dig was going on in the parish of Holm which is the nearest part of mainland Orkney to us. I'm not saying it was all cloak and dagger but nobody really knew why they were digging where they were or what they were looking for and certainly nobody outside the circle of diggers and supervisors knew what they had found. A press release a couple of weeks ago however had everyone getting very excited; they had found what they were looking for, a neolithic chambered tomb and despite the fact that part of it had been robbed out ( i.e. stone taken away to build a house) in the 1800s the bits that were left were crammed with articulated skeletons.
This is exciting on many different levels; the fact that it was known about and then forgotten again, , the number of bodies, the fact that the skeletons were carefully placed in unnatural positions and that they were articulated, plus the chance that there may be a nearby settlement to dig- the list goes on. The talk will be up on the OAS You Tube channel shortly for anyone interested.
Obviously while there we bought raffle tickets, And obviously once again we didn't win.
Sounds promising!
ReplyDelete