Thinking about the sea wall prompted me to have a look at some more of the Tom Kent photos of Skara Brae, they show a side of the excavation that you don’t usually see. Everyone knows of course that the excavation in the 1920s/30s was directed by the great Professor V Gordon Childe, but there's very little detail recorded about the men who did the digging, although they do appear in some of the photos:
They would have been employed by HM Ministry of Public Buildings & Works, the forerunner of our modern conservation bodies. In Childe's day it was customary to have supervision from a gentleman, but digging was the preserve of poorly paid labourers … although come to think of it, that's not that different from our lives on the digging circuit back in the 1980s!
Childe kept meticulous records of his excavations, which included detailed notebooks, and the site was very quickly published. I came across a couple of Childe's original site notebooks online and these are well worth a look, the links below take you straight to the pdfs for download on the UCL website:
Childe also took photographs of his excavations, but I'm not sure he would have been able to cope with modern health & safety requirements - I dread to think how many tons of stone are being held up by the broken lintels in the pic below. To be fair they'd been there for 5,000 years, so the feeling was probably that they'd last long enough to take the photo!
Skara Brae was excavated with the intent of putting the site on display to the public, and Childe obviously encouraged visitors during the excavation, as we also do of course at Swandro, although most people visiting digs these days tend to dress rather more casually – standards have obviously slipped since Childe's day!
We're counting down to our 2018 Swandro dig season, which is likely to be from late June to possibly early August 2018, but we're still finalising funding. We have a particular problem of difficult site access for basic equipment such as portacabins to use as site offices for finds and records etc. It's customary to hire portacabins, which are delivered by lorry and hoisted into site: not an option at Swandro - steep hills without tracks and heavy goods vehicles do not mix! We have to use trailers, and there's none available for hire here: readers may remember last year that due to the generosity of the public we were able to buy a second-hand trailer for finds processing: here it is leaving site last year behind a volunteer's Landy:
We really need another similar trailer, one end partitioned off with space for a chemical toilet for the diggers (we have tried a toilet tent in previous years but it kept blowing away - and in any case anyone who's ever tried to get out of a full set of wet weather gear in an Orkney gale to use a toilet in a very small tent will appreciate that this was a far from ideal solution). The main part of the trailer will be our first aid station/site records office. We can't get one second-hand, so we're hoping to buy new, which delivered to Orkney will cost us £5,844, which we need to raise by the 1st of May to give us time to get the trailer home in time for this year's dig. This is a huge amount of money but we're hoping that our supporters might rally round and help us out once again, and if anyone feels able to make even a small donation it would be more than welcome. Please click the button below for further details.
US taxpayers wishing to make a tax-deductible donation of $500 or more in support of our work may do so via CAF America, a 501 (c) (3) not-for-profit, either online by credit card or by mailing a US personal check. Click the button below for full details.
Aerial view of the threatened site at Swandro - the Neolithic chambered tomb is the concentric circles on the right, with the Iron Age, Pictish and Vikings building to the left. The Atlantic Ocean is lapping at the edge of the site. Please make a donation!
We've also been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century and now have our very own text donation code. I'm thinking of having this tattooed on our diggers foreheads - or possibly I should just stick to putting it on T - shirts?
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