A vital part of our annual fundraising is the site sponsor-a-square, which runs each year during the summer excavation. The results from all the sponsored squares are emailed out to their sponsors once we’ve finished collating all the data. We’ve got thousands of finds to tally up and allocate to …
Archaeology Scotland had the opportunity to visit the Ness during this summer’s eight-week excavation season. Click here to read their report.
Professor Mark Edmonds will launch his new book, Orcadia – Land, Sea and Stone in Neolithic Orkney, at an open event in the Stromness Library on Monday evening, October 14. At the launch, Mark will give a talk on Neolithic Orkney and some of the material covered in his book, …
A must buy for anyone interested in the Neolithic of Orkney and its wonderful sites, is the brilliant new book Orcadia – Land, Sea and Stone in Neolithic Orkney by Professor Mark Edmonds, long-term friend and supporter of the Ness. This handsome and beautifully written volume really puts the Ness …
A link to today’s Current Archaeology’s article on this summer’s excavation: https://www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/summer-of-finds-at-the-ness-of-brodgar.htm
The Ness was very pleased today to welcome a special guest to site – well in fact two – Morph and his creator Peter Lord and his family. Peter is the animator, film producer, director and co-founder of the Academy Award-winning Aardman Animations studio – best known for his clay-animated films …
Regular readers of our daily excavation blog will recall that for a few days in August, towards the end of the season, Trench P was the subject of a major clean-up operation. All hands were on deck, with over 60 diggers diverted to Trench P ahead of a massive photography …
Three tiny flint tools are the latest evidence of Mesolithic activity on the Ness of Brodgar peninsula. Previous finds of Mesolithic tools on site suggest people were living and moving across the Ness long before the Neolithic (c.4000–2500BC). The crescent microlith and two backed bladelets were found by lithic specialist …
This year the Art Hut hosted four artists: Jeanne Bouza Rose, Diane Eagles, Karen Wallis, and Annie Wright. For the first four weeks of the excavation, Annie Wright took photos of the diggers and the stones, portraying “Life in the Trenches”, as part of her collections of ancient heritage sites. …
On August 6, a small, decorated stone was removed from the cell outside the eastern entrance to Structure Twelve. The stone, measuring 18cm long, was among the rubble removed from a blocking deposit but because the incised marks were so faint it was a devil to photograph on site. Here …
Trench J, and with it Structures Five and Thirty-Two and the “Great Wall of Brodgar”, may have been covered over today, but you can revisit it in detail with this new 3D model from supervisor Paul Durdin. The spectacular model shows Trench J at its finest – cleaned at …
It’s been a long, hard day of manual labour in some not-so-pleasant weather conditions, but we’ve covered over around 90 percent of the site. Aided by volunteers from the public as well as a group of Highland Park Distillery staff, great progress was made cocooning the archaeology with protective sandbags, …
Day Thirty-Eight Physical traces of a Neolithic potter? This, dear readers, is our last diary of the 2019 excavation season at the Ness. You will have realised that there are certain people who are absolutely essential to the success of this extraordinary archaeological adventure, and we want to thank them …
Day Thirty-Seven Human bone and a standing stone… In the best archaeological tradition, and with two days to go of the 2019 Ness dig, some amazing discoveries have been made – not least of which, and definitely the most unexpected, is the discovery of a second human arm bone from …
