The Shorkneys: Neolithic Orkney, Part Two

(Note: "Shorkney" is not a real word. We're just using it to write about our recent trip to Aberdeen, Orkney, and Shetland.)

In our last post, we looked at the three great monuments of Neolithic Orkney: Maeshowe, the Standing Stones of Stenness, and the Ring of Brodgar. In this post, we'll look at Skara Brae, the fourth part of Orkney's UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Before we get into the (pre)history, though, we need a bit of backstory. You see, Skara Brae has been something of an obsession for Nana's family ever since her mother got her hands on a children's book about the site. (Yes, they're the kind of family that reads children's books about Neolithic villages.)

Nana's mom hates flying, but she always said if she were going to fly anywhere, it would be to Skara Brae. That right there is half the reason we went to the Shorkneys--the other half being the fact that a friend of ours here in Edinburgh hails from Shetland.

Now, I have to admit, I wasn't really sure Skara Brae would live up to that billing, and I was even less sure after we left Stenness. The Neolithic monuments of Orkney really got to me. It was just so amazing to think of people clinging to life in this far-flung corner of the world, unspeakable ages ago, devoting the work of several generations to these structures, which were science and religion and art, curiosity and hope and ambition, everything that makes us human really, all poured into these stones. I mean, how could Skara Brae compete with that?

But as it turned out, Skara Brae had its own kind of magic. Around the world, the vast majority of the structures that survive from that time (around 3000 B.C., just like the other Neolithic sites on Orkney) are ceremonial or monumental, and over time they've kind of become part of the landscape. But Skara Brae isn't: it's just a village, and a remarkably well-preserved one at that, which makes it so much easier to envision as a living place than a lot of other Neolithic sites.

Anyway--to the site!

Skara Brae is made up of ten houses clustered together at the edge of Skaill Bay, which opens onto the North Atlantic. The village may have been larger at one point: at the time it was inhabited, sea levels were lower, so the bay was a freshwater lake and the shoreline was farther away.

Today, as you can see from the photo below, the water comes almost right up to the ruins, making it quite a chore to preserve the site.

Sometime after it was abandoned (in about 2500 B.C., for unknown reasons), Skara Brae was covered over with a huge sand dune. The village lay hidden until 1850, when the proprietor of nearby Skaill House was walking his grounds the day after a huge storm and found this place basically in his back yard.

(It's a very big back yard.)

Each of the houses was a built of stone with earth spread on top. The earth was both for insulation and to hold the walls and ceilings together, kind of the same way the weight on the keystone of an arch keeps it from collapsing. Some of the oldest houses were dug down into the ground; others were built up above ground level or dug into man-made middens (ie, trash heaps).

The passages between and among the houses were also covered over, so the whole settlement was kind of like a system of man-made caves. It's not clear why they did this--possibly for more insulation.

(The path you see there would have been more like a tunnel.)

The houses themselves are very well preserved, and include some of the earliest examples of furniture ever found. Archeologists refer to the big shelves as "dressers" and the large compartments on the floor as "beds."

The smaller compartments may have been primitive coolers, or they may have been used to boil or steam food by filling them with water, dropping in a hot coal, and covering them up.

To give visitors a better idea of how the houses might have looked when they were in use, there's a walk-in model at the entrance to the site.

Beyond the houses themselves, Skara Brae has also been a treasure trove for other artifacts. Some of these artifacts also feature what looks like primitive writing--though this would be really strange, and such claims are very controversial.

In addition, a low road connects Skara Brae to the Ring of Brodgar, and there is also some evidence linking Skara Brae to certain Neolithic sites in Ireland.

In fact, cultural links between the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and the northern parts of Ireland have recurred throughout recorded history and on into the modern day, largely because for much of history it was so much easier to get around the British Isles by sea than by land. We'll see this again in a future post on how Orkney (and, to a lesser degree, Shetland) sat at the center of a medieval Norse empire that stretched from Scandinavia to Britain, Ireland, Iceland, and even North America.

The Shorkneys: Neolithic Orkney, Part One

(Note: "Shorkney" is not a real word. We're just using it to write about our recent trip to Aberdeen, Orkney, and Shetland.)

As I mentioned in our previous post, Orkney is probably best known for its stone-age heritage, and rightfully so. The Heart of Neolithic Orkney is a UNESCO World Heritage Site comprising the four sites described below, each of which we visited in one action-packed day.

Of the four sites, three--Maeshowe, the Standing Stones of Stenness, and the Ring of Brodgar--are within sight of one another, arrayed around a land bridge between a salt-water inlet and a fresh-water loch at the center of a bowl-shaped valley. For complicated meteorological reasons, this area is one of the sunniest spots in all of Orkney, and on the day we visited it seemed to be suspended in a conspicuous bubble in the middle of a wall of sea mist.

(A major site at the Ness of Brodgar, between Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar, is still being excavated. Early reports suggest evidence of a "Neolithic cathedral"--similar, perhaps, to the Maltese megaliths we visited earlier this year.)

The fourth site, Skara Brae, is a short drive away from the other three. It will get its own short post sometime this week.

Maes Howe

Our first stop in Neolithic Orkney was Maeshowe, a burial chamber in the passage grave style. From the outside, the structure looks like a grassy hill plopped incongruously in the middle of a low plain.

Inside, the structure consists of a long, low passage (you have to double over to get in) leading to a large chamber, with smaller chambers branching off to three sides. (No photos inside, I'm afraid.)

Like many Neolithic structures, such as the much more famous Stonehenge in England, Maeshowe was apparently built to align with astronomical events. Here, on the winter solstice, the sun shines through the narrow entryway and illuminates the back wall of the chamber.

The current theory is that the chamber was used as an ossuary (a building for the ritual storage of bones), but the chamber was empty at the time of its "modern" discovery in 1861--emptied, possibly, by the Vikings, who also used Maeshowe as a shelter and, possibly, a burial chamber or treasure horde. In fact, in an upcoming post on Viking Orkney and Shetland, we'll look at Maeshowe again, as it's the largest repository of Old Norse runic inscriptions outside of Scandinavia.


Maeshowe dates from about 3000 BC--about 500 years older than Stonehenge.

Standing Stones of Stenness

The Standing Stones of Stenness, which also date to around 3000 BC, are the remnants of a stone circle standing roughly halfway between Maeshowe and the Ring of Brodgar. Some archaeologists speculate that the circle was a temple to the moon, while the Ring of Brodgar across the way was a temple to the sun.

The surviving stones are very tall, as you can see below, and the complete ring must have been an awesome sight back in the day!

Stenness has been used as a ritual site into modern times, though usually associated with Norse mythology rather than with any direct Neolithic connection. Local couples used to use the Odin Stone (now toppled) to pledge their engagements. Couples would hold hands through the hole in the stone and speak a traditional oath.

The Standing Stones of Stenness even bear the mark of Sir Walter Scott, whose shadow one just cannot escape in this country. Scott visited the site in 1814 and decided to incorporate it into one of his novels, The Pirate, which is the fictionalized tale of a local boy, John Gow, who sailed off into the wide world and made good by going bad.

In The Pirate, Scott (who was never afraid to pull out all the stops) used Stenness as the setting for an attempted human sacrifice, adding an entirely fictional sacrificial altar to the scene. Later visitors to the site, presumably unwilling to live in a universe in which Walter Scott could be proven wrong, duly erected an altar of their own.

It was only much later that some pranksters knocked the false altar down.

The Ring of Brodgar

The Ring of Brodgar is an enormous henge and stone circle a few hundred meters on the other side of Stenness from Maeshowe. To get there, you pass the Watchstone of Stenness and cross a narrow man-made causeway dating to Neolithic times.

In fact, it was this causeway that caused the water on the right to turn fresh while the water on the left remained salty. This phenomenon likely attracted even more settlers to the area, as from one spot you can fish for both saltwater and freshwater fish.

The stones of Brodgar themselves aren't all that big (much smaller than either Stenness or Stonehenge) . . .

. . . it's the scale of the site as a whole that's impressive. When you're inside it almost doesn't feel like a circle.

The fact that Historic Scotland, who administer all of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney sites, has left the center of the ring overgrown with an impassable thicket of heather only adds to the desolate beauty of the place.

Like Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar has also become a focal point for more recent traditions. Local legend has it that if you walk around the circle counterclockwise three times, you will have a baby within the following year.

(Don't get too excited--we walked around clockwise, and then only once!)

Bonus Question: Where did the other stones go?


Both circles (Stenness and Brodgar) are currently incomplete, but we know they used to be complete because archaeologists have found the holes where the other stones used to be. Some of the stones were broken by the weather. When lightning strikes on the open plain around Stenness and Brogdar, it's likely to hit one of the stones. That's what got the stone below--though this one stayed standing.

Some stones, after they were broken or fell over, were carried away to be used in other building projects to save the builder from having to quarry new stone. Such stones were especially in demand because wood is so scarce in Orkney, making stone the preferred building material since times immemorial.

In fact, that's one of the wonders of these sites: you'd expect them to be even more incomplete. But it seems that later cultures largely respected (possibly, feared) these Neolithic monuments and tried to leave them be.

History from the Bottom Up, Part 2: Things To See In Malta When You're Dead

This is Part 2 in a series about Maltese history, as told via the conceit of an archaeological excavation - from the bottom layer up.

The Hypogeum

(Visitor's note: Hypogeum tickets must be booked in advance. Our guidebook suggests at least two weeks; the guide on site said even earlier in the busy season. We certainly only got ours on a week's notice because it was January. You can purchase and print tickets online.)

The Hal Saflieni Hypogeum (select it from the "sites" dropdown menu) provides another excellent excuse for a teacher to sneak in a vocabulary exercise. While sitting in the lobby, Justin and I realized we didn't actually know what a hypogeum was. We puzzled it out and came up with "hypo" from "hypodermic needle," which we figured must mean "under-skin needle," and added "geo," meaning "earth," and "-um" as a Greek suffix, a la gymnasium, meaning a place or room. Therefore, a hypogeum must be an underground room.

And guess what? That's precisely what it is. A very, very, very, very old underground room. This room was dug out below ground at roughly the same time the megaliths were being erected on the surface, which is to say, c. 3500 or 3000 BC, five thousand years ago. As I mentioned before, I struggle to contextualize such remote history. It's about the same time as the settlement at Skara Brae, in the Orkneys (on our list to visit when it gets warmer) and is about 1000-1500 years older than when most Biblical historians estimate Abraham to have lived.

Unlike the megaliths, the Hypogeum makes you feel every one of those years.

The Hypogeum is special for many reasons. First, it's tremendously well-preserved for its age. It was discovered in the late 19th century by accident, when houses were built on the site. Justin suggests that the late rise in Maltese population density may be a critical factor in the discovery of so many important Neolithic sites here. China is so large that things get lost. In Egypt, where the space has been continuously densely inhabited, ancient places are often destroyed or looted. Malta, however, is small enough that things are likely to be found, and did not get dense enough to require intensive building-over until the 19th century. The bad news is that much was lost in the first few years, before the site came to the attention of archaeologists and the house-building was stopped. It also was damaged by its own popularity - as with Lascaux Caves, carbon dioxide from visitors' breath damaged the wall paintings. It's since been restored with the help of UNESCO.

But what IS it? That's the second reason it's special. It was a burial site, yes, but there are other ancient burial sites in the world. What's odd about the Hypogeum is that it was both a burial site and place of worship - a graveyard inside a church (something we'll see more of in Malta later on). Today, the bodies are in many places: lost during the early excavations, moved to research facilities, and (to my surprise) in some cases left undisturbed. According to my guide, that's been done so that if future technology surpasses modern technology, they'll still have something original left to inspect. Interesting and farsighted - I haven't heard of it being done anywhere else.

Visitors aren't allowed to take pictures inside the Hypogeum, but even if we could, they wouldn't convey the feeling you get from visiting the site. I think Justin and I were fortunate to visit on a day that the audio guides were experiencing technical difficulties, because that meant we were shown around by a live curator for the site, a man named Joseph. I don't think any prerecorded guide could have done what Joseph did. He made you feel the site so strongly that you expected to come around the corner and see it in use. This room in particular - the main chamber - he really brought to life. If you take a look at that image, I'll try to capture some of the ideas he shared about it. Don't blame him for any leaps of imagination here; any melodramatic interpretation of the space's use is purely my own.

Although the room was likely used for religious purposes, it might help you envision it to compare it to a theatre. The picture is taken from where the tour group stands, and presumably where the ordinary people would have stood in prehistoric times. Your eye is immediately drawn to the doorway in the upper right. Through a clever trick of perspective, this doorway appears human-sized, but is in fact much shorter. A priest entering through this space would have to duck. An impressive way to make an entrance.

The doorways to the left help create that illusion, as they are about large enough for a person to lie down in. You assume the other doorway is the same. Some archaeologists suggest that the spaces were dreaming chambers for priests to receive visions - maybe with a bit of artificial help in the form of hallucinatory libations or smoke. The walls would have been painted in red ochre, with the carved uprights and crosspieces left white.

It is very difficult to argue that the room was not intended for audience and performers of some sort, which in turn indicates a complex and hierarchical society with a division of labor. Someone would also have had the task of standing here, a carved wall niche which, when spoken into, projects the speaker's voice throughout the entire underground complex.

So there you are, a prehistoric inhabitant of sunny island Malta. You come underground for some sort of ceremony, and the temperature shifts: if it's summer, you're strangely cold; if winter, unnaturally hot. The light changes to flickering fire and lamps on red and white walls that maybe even remind you of muscle and bone, like you're inside the body of the earth. Men doze fitfully in carved niches, perhaps crying out at their strange dreams. The air is filled with humidity and smoke. Chanting or singing reverberates through the space, but you can't see the source of the sound. Could the ground itself be talking to you? Suddenly, a colossal figure, twice the size of a human body, erupts out of a doorway, flinging its arms wide and shouting at you.

I think I would have passed out.

Roman Catacombs

Jumping forward in time from prehistory to the classical period, we come to the Roman layer of Maltese history. Malta was ruled by the Phoenicians via the city of Carthage (of "Carthago delenda est"/Hannibal and the elephants fame) but the conquered by the Romans, who called it Melita. A catacomb is the modern term for an underground cemetery, which I believe the Romans would have called a necropolis ("city of the dead").

Malta has two, quite proximate to each other, in the city of Rabat, which is just outside the old capital of Mdina. This makes sense, because "Rabat" is a Semitic language family word for "suburb" (or settlement outside the city walls) and Roman law stipulated that all necropoli must be situated outside the city walls, presumably for hygiene reasons. The first one we visited was called St. Paul's, and is part of the Heritage Malta pass package.



It comes with a good audio guide, although the locations underground are not always easy to find. Makes you understand why in Roman times, you needed professional catacomb diggers ("fosserii") to help you find your ancestors.

At St. Paul's, you can see a number of interesting carved stone resting places:

- arcosolium - looks a bit like a carved window seat with a canopied arch, except of course no window
- canopied tombs - hard to find a picture; looks just like a canopy bed
- small "loculi" - carved niches in walls; here mostly for babies and children
- floor graves

And more. St. Agatha's is similar, but better preserved - and also not included with the Heritage Malta pass, so it will set you back an additional admission fee. A highlight of St. Agatha's is the surviving Roman fresco, and the more recent church, which I'll get to in a later post on Christian Malta. In the high season, with larger groups, you can't go into the fresco room anymore, but once again Justin and I lucked out by being the only two people on the tour.

Our guide was researcher working on the catacombs and gave us some interesting information about it. The Maltese catacombs, for instance, contain both Christians and Jews, and are not segregated by religion. His current research is into the fact that according to tomb carvings, Jews of the period significantly outlived Christians: Christians made it to their 40s, whereas Jews lived into their 70s. The theory is that this relates to Jewish hygiene laws, which mandated frequent ablutions (washing), such as upon every return from the marketplace.

We also talked about carved agape tables (the one shown in the link is St. Paul's), where Romans would come down into the catacombs for a funeral banquet. People would recline around this table to eat and drink. Take a look at the carved circular part of the table. See the break in the lip? That's for swiping spilled food into a bucket, for which there was a carved niche ready. Eventually, this practice was banned by the Catholic church. St. Paul's's ('s's's) audio guide said discreetly that this was due to immoral practices. The St. Agatha's guide was more direct. Let's just say that by the early middle ages, they were throwing some toga-optional toga parties in the catacombs.

A final comment on the Hypogeum and catacombs: in keeping with archaeological logic (archaologic?) and the theme of my posts, you would probably assume that the lowermost layers of these places would be the oldest. In fact, that's backwards. Think about it: you're digging down from the surface. You can't carve the bottom part without having gone through the top part first. Therefore, underground facilities are a weird and interesting exception to the law of lower=older. In the catacombs and hypogea of the world, the further down you go, the more recent the space is.

Whew! That was a beast of a post. And now my work here is done... time to head toward the light...

History From the Bottom Up, Part 1: Maltese Megaliths

First, an addendum: You may be wondering how a couple of broke graduate students afforded a holiday trip like this. The answer is that we didn't. My grandfather Bibo, one of the Official Grandpas of The Educated Burgher, gave us a tremendously generous Christmas cheque and told us to do something valuable to us with it. We asked him if he'd like to be the sponsor of a vacation we otherwise wouldn't have taken, and he said absolutely.

So as they say in Muppet Christmas Carol: to Mr. Batchelder, the Founder of the Feast!

And now back to the history.

Human settlement on Malta dates back at least 5,500 years. This means, as it often does in Europe, that history is stacked on top of history. Justin and I will report back on our Maltese explorations, starting with what remains underground and working our way up.

Maltese Megaliths

Until now, the oldest place I've visited in person was the burial site of the Terracotta Army in Xi'an, China. Dating back to ~210 B.C., it predates the Roman Coliseum by nearly 300 years, although those of you who have been to Greece will be less impressed (the Parthenon, for instance, is 200 years older), as will visitors to the Pyramids, which are a whopping 2,300 years older - the oldest was built around 2600 BC.

Well, Those Of You Who Have Been To Greece And Egypt, hold on to your chairs and prepare to be impressed. The oldest construct on Malta dates back to about 3600 B.C. That's right - as far away from the Pyramids as we are from Charlemagne. I'm referring to the Megaliths of Malta, a collective UNESCO World Heritage Site. These stone temples were built all over the islands, evidently for religious purposes. The oldest temple complex, Ggantija, is often considered the oldest freestanding stone structure in the world.

Not only are they old, they're also huge. Time for a vocabulary teaching moment! Ggantija, as you may have guessed, does incorporate the word "Giant": it means "Giant's Tower. (Although Maltese is a Semitic language, and primarily Arabic in grammatical structure, much of the vocabulary comes from Italian. It's comparable to English's classification as a Germanic language in spite of the bulk of the vocabulary coming from Latin through French). The Maltese temple builders departed inexplicably some time around 2500 BC, and later inhabitants of the island often attributed their temple ruins to a race of giants. Bonus vocabulary: the word "megalith," from the Greek "mega" (large) and "lithos" (stone) also refers to the size of the structures.


A close-up of the sign shows the distinctive trefoil shape of Maltese temples:

and Justin poses inside next to a well-preserved altar:

Ggantija is located on Gozo, one of the three Maltese islands (Malta, Gozo, and Comino). Nobody lives on Comino except hotel staff in the tourist season. The other currently excavated megaliths are located on Malta.

Hagar Qim:


Mnajdra:


The last picture suggests a solution to the question of how the temples were roofed. Wood has been scarce on Malta since prehistoric times. The temple builders solved this problem by corbelling. This means that when you build a wall, you make each stone layer slightly longer than the one it sat on, gradually closing the walls in. It ends up looking like you're inside a beehive. (I learned about corbels as a kid from What It Feels Like To Be A Building, which for my money is the world's best children's book on architectural engineering.)

What's that you say? I promised to start underground? Hey, they used to be underground. It's not my fault archaeologists got there first. In fact, the excavation in the 19th century of most of these temples has been a bad thing. Scientific methodology at the time was not as stringent, and the exposure of the sites to wind and rain has caused them to deteriorate more in the last hundred years than in the thousands they spend below ground. The scaffolding you saw above on the Ggantija Temples is part of the preservation effort. Hagar Qim and Mnajdra have been placed under tents:


Another means of preservation is removing the original stones and replacing them with replicas. The decorated stones shown here are replicas placed at the Tarxien Temples site. The originals have been moved to the National Museum of Archaeology for preservation.

Carved animal stone; perhaps an altar:

Spiral patterns, a popular design motif in Malta's prehistoric art:

And remains of one of Malta's famous "fat lady" figures, which suggest a mother goddess or fertility cult to modern scholars.

But if you won't buy my excuse-making that previously underground sites qualify as underground, then how about this: tune in next time for the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum!

Overall personal reaction to the temples? Well, it is definitely cool to see them, but for me, it was a struggle to see them as they were, and to remember that they had been buildings. Tarxien in particular is a messy pile of stones. I think kids or students would have serious difficulty envisioning the original form and connecting to the colossal engineering achievement that they represented at the time. After seeing two or three, the temples started to blur with each other, and I was annoyed that the sites themselves did not make a clear distinction between original and replica stonework. The entrance fees also feel steep, possibly due to the expense of preservation, unless you do what we did and get the Heritage Malta pass (it gives you one access each to all their sites, including museums, and is a much better bargain if you are planning on seeing at least four or five sites).

Eddie Izzard has a comedy routine in which he proposes that mass murder is simply too much for the human mind to comprehend. The gist is that one murder earns you the death penalty, serial killing perhaps puts you in an asylum, but twelve million murders leaves you thinking, "Well done! You must get up very early in the morning!" (It is, admittedly, a particularly dark comedy routine). I think I had a similar feeling with the temples. Five thousand five hundred years is simply not an age that I can make meaningful in my mind. This is my problem, though, and not a problem with the sites. As a UNESCO junkie, I'm definitely glad I went, but my experience at the Hypogeum was much stronger.