Welcome to the April edition of the Swandro newsletter
First the most important news - we have our 2018 dig dates! The team will be arriving on site on Monday the 25th of June and departing site on Friday 3rd August and visitors are very welcome during our usual digging week of Sunday to Thursday inclusive. It will take us a while to get the site opened up, so it's probably best if you don't plan to visit us until Thursday 28th June, otherwise all you'll see will be tired and sweaty diggers (unless you're bringing big bags of doughnuts, in which case come every day, possibly twice a day – opening up sites needs lots of sugar & fat!). Similarly at the end of the dig we usually spend the last few days covering the site up again so don't leave it too late. Our priority this year is working on our chambered tomb, the entrance passageway of which was uncovered in the 2017 evaluation.
We've had lots of requests to volunteer on the site but we haven't had a chance to get back to people yet. We do apologise for the delay, and please rest assured that we haven't lost your details and we will hopefully be contacting people within the next couple of weeks. We have had an awful lot of offers of diggers, so we will inevitably have to disappoint most people, so we hope that you won't hold that against us, and will continue to follow our progress through our dig diary via our Facebook page and our Twitter feed
Looking back to a previous season, we wanted to share with you another of our star finds, this lovely little blue glass bead found in the Viking levels of the site. As you can see it's tiny, but luckily we have some very sharp-eyed diggers:
Glass beads are found in small quantities in Viking settlement sites in Orkney such as Quoygrew, Westray and at the Brough of Birsay in the Mainland. They are only usually found in any numbers in burial contexts, and the most relevant for example for Swandro is the Viking cemetery at Westness, which is literally the next headland around the coast from Swandro. This was famously discovered in 1963 by a farmer burying a dead cow – as luck would have it he buried his cow directly over a richly furnished Viking grave which included the Westness brooch, and a rather fine necklace, with a mixture of glass and stone beads, both now in the National Museum Scotland.
One of the best collections Viking/Norse beads is from a cist at Moan in Harray which was ploughed up in July 1886. The finds subsequently found their way into the Cursiter collection and are now in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow. There are 64 beads, a mixture of amber and glass, and it's possible that they were accompanying a cremation, an unusual (but not unknown) burial rite for the period. James Cursiter was a keen collector and amassed an extensive archaeological collection from all periods which should still be in Orkney – Cursiter offered it to the Kirkwall Borough Council with a view to forming a museum but it was turned down. Thankfully instead of it being broken up and sold it was accepted by the Hunterian – Orkney's loss is Glasgow's gain!
There's quite a range of different styles of beads in the assemblage from Moan, and they are quite a bit nicer than the Westness examples but not so well-known, presumably because they were found in the late 19th century.
If you want to know more about Viking glass beads then have a look at Megan Hickey's MA thesis: 'Perler fra vikingtiden (Beads of the Viking-Age). A study of the social and economic patterns in the appearance of beads from Viking-Age sites in Britain'which is freely available online
To finish we just want to say a huge THANK YOU to everyone who's donated to our site hut/toilet trailer appeal– thanks to your generosity we've raised a grand total of £4,050 since our appeal started in early March, meaning we need just another £1,794 to reach the final target. Thank you all so much, we hopefully will be able to tell you in our next newsletter that the target has been reached and we have a new trailer to keep our finds hut company!
All donations large or small to the 2018 dig fund are very welcome please click the button below for details or to make a donation with your credit/debit card.
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.
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