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Scotland
The Western Isles
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Sites/Groups in this region:
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10 sites
Barra |
3 posts
62 sites Lewis and Harris |
6 posts
48 sites North Uist, Benbecula and South Uist |
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3 posts
1 site St. Kilda |
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The Hebridean Iron Age: Twenty Years' ResearchBy D.W. Harding: This paper reviews progress in Atlantic Scottish Iron Age studies over the past twenty years, with particular reference to a long-term programme of fieldwork in west Lewis undertaken by the University of Edinburgh. It deprecates the survival and revival of older conventional models for defining and dating the major field monuments of the period and region in the face of accumulating evidence for the origins of Atlantic roundhouses in the mid-first millennium BC, and discusses important new evidence for the first-millennium AD sequence of occupation and material culture. The material assemblages of the Hebridean Iron Age are contrasted with the impoverished and relatively aceramic material culture of lowland Scotland and northern England, and the importance of the western seaways in later prehistoric and early historic times as a distinctive cultural region is emphasised. |
Posted by Hob19th September 2005ce Edited 30th August 2007ce |
Latest posts for the Western Isles |
Showing 1-10 of 1,145 posts. Most recent first | Next 10 
Callanish (Standing Stones) — Images (click to view fullsize) |
 
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Posted by GLADMAN18th February 2013ce |
Cladh Hallan Round Houses (Ancient Village / Settlement / Misc. Earthwork) — News |
Prehistoric mummy puzzleFrom Planet Earth Online: Mummified bodies made of chopped up people? It's not a legend from ancient Egypt but a find from the Outer Hebrides. Tamera Jones finds out how the latest forensic techniques were applied to the mystery of Britain's first prehistoric mummies. When Professor Mike Parker Pearson from the University of Sheffield started excavating the Bronze Age Cladh Hallan settlement on South Uist, one of the first things his team found was a row of three roundhouses. Radio-carbon dating showed they were built around 1100 BC. Further digging revealed several burials directly under the houses. Not so unusual in itself, but the archaeologists were surprised by the contorted and scrunched-up positions of the skeletons, which looked similar to mummy bundles found in Peru. 'We also noticed that the male skeleton had a full set of teeth in his lower jaw, but the upper set was completely missing,' says Pearson. 'Our first thought was that this was some kind of Bronze Age torture victim.' But forensic pathology showed the two jaws didn't match at all. Several months of painstaking analysis revealed that in fact the man's skull, mandible and torso came from three different people. 'It looked like these individuals had been cut up and put back together to look like one person,' says Pearson. Then the mystery deepened even further. When the bodies were dated they turned out to be several hundred years older than the houses, which meant they had been stored for several generations before they were buried. The position of the bones in both adult skeletons suggested they had still been held together by soft tissue when they were buried, so they had been stored with particular care. Pearson and biomedical archaeologist Professor Terry Brown from the University of Manchester, took the remains to NERC's Isotope Geosciences Laboratory where scientists used a range of techniques to work out where the bodies might have been kept. These included the rather grisly mercury intrusion porosimetry, which shows how far gut bacteria has eaten into the surrounding bones after death. In this case, not very far; decay had started in the male's torso but then something had stopped it, and there was no sign of decay in the female corpse at all. Other techniques showed Pearson and his colleagues that the surfaces of the bones had become demineralised, something that happens in an acidic environment. All the forensic evidence suggested that the bodies had been preserved in a peat bog for several months before being taken out and dried. They must then have been stored above ground for hundreds of years before being merged with other mummified individuals and finally buried. 'At the time this was the first ever evidence of mummification outside of South America and Egypt,' says Pearson. 'Before this, mummification in the British Bronze Age was unheard of.' Most recently, DNA from the female's skull, jaw, arm and thigh bones has shown that, just like the male, the woman's skeleton was made up of at least three individuals - and the cranium and mandible were male. What led our ancestors to mummify and combine these bodies is anyone's guess. But Pearson thinks it has something to do with merging ancestries. 'Lots of fields and ditches were being built across Britain in the middle Bronze Age', he says. 'An obvious thing to do would be to coalesce ancestors' remains as a way of asserting rights over this newly enclosed land.' |
Posted by baza22nd January 2013ce |
Barpa Langass (Chambered Cairn) — Images |
 
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Posted by thelonious31st December 2012ce |
Pobuill Fhinn (Stone Circle) — Images |
 
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Posted by thelonious 31st December 2012ce |
Toroghas (Standing Stones) — Images |
 
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Posted by tiompan15th November 2012ce |
Maari (Standing Stone / Menhir) — Images |
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Posted by tiompan 15th November 2012ce |
Showing 1-10 of 1,145 posts. Most recent first | Next 10
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