Art and Architecture at the Ness of Brodgar

[00:00:00]So, it's a great pleasure, a really great pleasure for me to introduce this evening, uh, Dr. Antonio Thomas from UHI. She's going to talk to us about the art and architecture at the Nessa Broadgar.

[00:00:13]And this, of course, is one of her specialist subjects.

[00:00:17]She has many, many specialisms. Um, and she's a very, very strong scholar and a wonderful communicator. So, it really is great to have you here, Antonio.

[00:00:28]And I said I would give the brief biography we have. It's not so brief, but I also think it's important that you know who's standing in front of you rather than just assuming that you know she's got a CV of two lines long because she doesn't. She has a very long CV, a very impressive one. So she's associate professor of art and archaeology at UHI and she's based within the archaeology institute at UHI ornne.

[00:00:55]A PhD undertaken at Abedine in 2016 was entitled art and architecture in Neolithic Ornne process temporality and context and involved a detailed study of the decorated stonework from Maze How Scarab and particularly the Nessa Broadg where she's been part of the excavation and post excavation team since 2006.

[00:01:23]Antonio was a member of the advisory panel for Scotland's uh rock art project. Scrap, that's the anacronym there. It's a very strange one. Uh scrap. Um and has been commissioned by historic environment Scotland to undertake specialist architectural survey work at tombs in Ornne, including the home of Papa Wester South, where she identified previously unknown carvings and and rediscovered some which had been thought to have been lost or long destroyed. Her interest in art and archaeology ranges from the Neolithic to the present day. And in 2020, she launched a unique interdisciplinary masters program in contemporary art and archaeology at UHI, which continues to attract students from across the UK, Europe, and North America.

[00:02:13]So, you can see why I persevered with that biography.

[00:02:17]>> Thank you very much, Antonio. We look forward to hearing what you have to say.

[00:02:20]Thank you. Thanks. Thank you.

[00:02:28]I mean days are flushing with all this actually, but thank you very much. That was I lived up to that uh wonderful introduction. So, thank you. Um but thank you for coming tonight and it's great to see so many friendly and familiar faces here and also so many people who have also been part of the Nanessa Broga for a very long time as well and lots of people who know a lot more about the site than I do. So, thank you very much for coming along and uh listening to a lot of this. Um, because the Nesprogger is such a well-known site and because so many people know so much about it, what I hope to do tonight is offer a bit of a personal reflection on my involvement in the site um over the last few years. um how I came to be interested in the decorated stones in the first place and a little bit about my journey with them and some of the kind of ideas around them that have preoccupied me um over the last uh too many years and uh some of the kind of challenges and opportunities um that arise from studying this this truly remarkable and uh worldclass unique assemblage. So, I'll hope to talk a little bit about that tonight and some of the ideas for the next stage as well as we enter this crucial kind of post excavation stage that we're in with the uh site. So, uh just checking I'm not standing in front of the screen. That's okay. Um so, first of all, if you'll indulge me, I want you to uh take a little trip back in time with me. not to the Neolithic just yet, but actually to 2006 and where I just started on the Nessa Broka site. Now, of course, this wasn't the start of the excavations. The start of the excavations really or the interest in the modern uh excavations on the site was in 2003 when Arie plowed up the stone in the field and lots of exciting things happened. Guard kind of revealed the building and all of these things that you know.

[00:04:22]So, but my involvement with the site started in 2006.

[00:04:27]So, cast your mind back. 20 years ago, Tony Blair was still prime minister.

[00:04:33]The Queen had just celebrated her 80th birthday, Germany was hosting the World Cup and I was having the most iconic archeological summer imaginable. Just a few weeks before um I worked on site here at the nest um I was lucky enough to find the Neolithic settlement at the brazer harbre in wire and then Nick asked me if I would uh be interested in digging a site in Sennis that they were assembling a small team for and so ended up working in trench J and um this is what it looked like then if you can very recognizable now for those I've got a little pointer. That was the Sundage that I was involved in digging. And I remember Nick making me dig down more and more just to prove it was natural.

[00:05:23]Um so the reason I've got this slide up is because um this is where the first uh decorated stone from the Nessa Broka um really uh came up. And here it is. And in 2006 um these two fragments and see they were found in two fragments different small fine numbers uh turned up uh in trench J.

[00:05:49]And just uh looking here you can see the kind of uh typical kind of what we would maybe call cross and lozenge kind of decoration. these kind of uh you know kind of row of soul tires if you like uh on this and we would have to wait until the following year 2007 um oops here we go uh to see uh the rest of it and the other bit kind of turned up or at least some of the you know we can imagine that there was a much bigger overall piece and these bits have been lost now it's something really exciting in archaeology when you get kind of bits that fit together. You know, it's one of those things that we all really love. Uh but particularly when they're in separate years as well, that's always particularly exciting happens. And you can see, you know, it's maybe not much to speak of when we kind of think about all the fantastic stones we have in the nest now, but this uh this kind of fragments here are really really important.

[00:06:49]Um now uh 2006 2007 if you'd have asked me back then to give a talk to Orney Archaeology Society about Orcne's rock art or passage grave art it would have been a very short talk indeed because before the Nesbrogger there were really only a handful or so known examples of what we might call Neolithic art from Orcne altogether or that had really been characterized in that And really if you think about how amazing Orcne's Neolithic is, it seems incredible that 20 years ago that thinking about decoration, thinking about rock art wasn't really part of that conversation. It was all about the monuments. It was all about the kind of big sites and things like that. And that was because we simply did not have the same material that we have now thanks to the Nessa Brog.

[00:07:41]Um now, of course, this wasn't the first stone that came from the site. Uh it was the first stone that came uh from the site during the modern kind of phase of excavations if you like. Um of course the first stone that came from the site was this one the incredible Broadka stone um that everyone knows. Uh here it is in its um as it was photographed by Peter Le senior in uh 1925 and he help helpfully choke in the edge of the stone just so we can all see those wonderful bands of insiz lines.

[00:08:15]eight bands each with a different pattern. Um, zigzags, uh, chevrons, uh, cross and lodge designs again. And these sort of designs that now we feel very familiar with as kind of really representing this kind of, uh, typical, uh, style that we see at Roda.

[00:08:36]Now, when it was found, um, it wasn't really thought to have been part of a Neolithic, um, site. uh the kind of orthostatic arrangement of upright slabs and also the decoration itself uh which is in many ways quite similar to what you'd see on beaker pottery um actually kind of suggested a bronze age rather than um Neolithic date and actually until kind of um I think it was in correct me but was it in 2008 actually found in structure um 8 the actual location where this had come from and then it was became um clear that it had actually come from one of the monumental structures on site at the Nessa Broga.

[00:09:17]But the reason it wasn't really thought to have been Neolithic art as such it did there was no real parallel for that at this time when it was found. And certainly in terms of thinking about Neolithic art, um what people tended to think of and still do to a certain extent is the kind of big big passage grave art that uh we see in very few sites actually in Orne. It's very much um not the the usual sites like peer wall was uh discovered during quarrying in 1981 in Westery and now thankfully back home in Wester this wonderful uh stone that you can see um here excuse me and this is very much um in the style of uh Europe's biggest and most dramatic assemblage of passage grave art um at New Graange and the Boing Valley sites in the east of Ireland and because they had dominated the literature for so long this is what people expect to see with uh passage graves and with Neolithic buildings um it was thought that Orcne really didn't have anything uh in comparison apart from these odd sites and of course the peer wall stone wasn't found until 1981 so before that there was just a a few stones from uh AD and uh other sites as well.

[00:10:44]And just to uh in addition to that, Orcne's most fabulous uh finest piece of Neolithic architecture at Maze How didn't doesn't have any of these sort of stones either because if there's anywhere in Orne you'd expect to see a big pet spiral huge phone or or something like that. It would certainly be maze how but it doesn't have that. In Orcne, people speak a little bit quieter, a little softer perhaps, and the expression is suitably subtle and restrained as well, but no less wonderful for it.

[00:11:26]So, in maze how there are actually loads of carvings, loads of Neolithic uh inscriptions.

[00:11:34]Um the one shown here, this one illustrated in the 1860s but dismissed as a kind of sketch or a doodle but certainly thought to have been north along with the other ones was only in the 1980s identified as a Neolithic carving by Patrick Ashmore of historic Scotland as it was then. And that's this one here.

[00:12:00]And you can see um that classic kind of banded decoration, the crosses, the lozen kind of shapes we've come to really kind of um expect almost from this style of artwork.

[00:12:16]In the 1990s and early 2000s, a team with Richard Bradley and Colin Richards um did lots of survey work across uh quite a number of maze how type tombs in Oaknne and identified a range of kind of carvings lightly insized carvings throughout many of them. And they identified this one in mae how that had not been seen before.

[00:12:40]And um when I came to do my survey work for my PhD um I found quite a few other ones in Mazeau as well including uh the other ones shown on this slide. So they're certainly there and you can see that this kind of banded decoration this kind of style is very similar to uh what we see on the Broadka stone and very similar to what we see in uh other stones at the nest as well.

[00:13:12]But one of the reasons that Ornne's rock art maybe wasn't in the public consciousness until uh perhaps with the Nessa Broga was until um then the largest assemblage of Neolithic rock art in Orcne actually didn't come from a burial site at all. Didn't come from a passage grave. Didn't come from anything associated uh typically witherary activity.

[00:13:38]came from Scarab Bray.

[00:13:41]And of course, we're so we're so unbelievably lucky in Orcne because we are the only place in Northwest Europe where we have stonebuilt burial sites and houses from the same time surviving. I mean, it's just extraordinary. We take it for granted a little bit, I think. Sometimes you have to stop and just think wow actually this is extraordinary what we have here and nowhere else has houses like this from that time. So nowhere else has the decoration in the houses from that time.

[00:14:20]So all those assumptions that art was just something to do with passage graves anderary sites was predicated on a lack of evidence for something that simply did not exist in other areas.

[00:14:32]Anyway, I'm here not to talk about scarab Vanessa Brog. So, back to the nest and back to trench P in particular.

[00:14:44]Moving away from trench J where I started and moving on to trench P and I this photo I was trying to work it out from the state of excavation stretch 14 and things. I think it's maybe 2016 something like that. Anyway, I was trying to figure it out and I wasn't quite sure, but uh Trench P was um opened in 2007 and then extended in 2008, which then took in structure 10.

[00:15:11]And it's structure 10 where I really started to get excited about Ornney's rock art and what was happening at the Nessa Broga.

[00:15:23]I was lucky enough to be a supervisor on site uh supervising structure 10. And this is me in 2009 drawing this mass of rubble which is actually just you can see how you I'm sure you all know how deep the trenches got at the end. So this is when it's all still very high up. And I often use this picture um in my with my art and archaeology students to think about drawing and the process of drawing and how it allows you to see things in archaeology.

[00:15:54]Because as any of us here know if you've been doing fieldwork, sometimes looking at the mass of rubble, it's very hard to make sense of things. But once you slow down and start to look in a way that requires that engagement between hand, eye, and brain that drawing does, you suddenly start to see things and it suddenly shifts into po focus like a magic eye picture and suddenly you see things.

[00:16:25]And for me in this rubble, which isn't just rubble, it's a very it's the upper mo most levels of um the very deliberate rubble uh filling structure 10 at the end of its life. Um started to notice that there are a lot of decorated stones that have been placed in that rubble, including some rather special ones. And here's a very much younger, slimmer version of me uh with one of the best stones from the site, which painfully known as the Brogga eye. And this was one of those stones because that turned up uh face down in that rubble layer.

[00:17:05]And the pecking on that stone seemed to me, at least excavating it, that it was very fresh. It was almost like it had been pecked to be placed in it, which perhaps speaks to the spe special deposition of that rubble, but certainly triggered something in my brain and made me want to study it. And so that was what led to me studying my PhD. And this was a picture that um Fen MacArthur took for Radio Orley a long time ago um when we were talking about that.

[00:17:37]So um again sorry indulging me 10 years ago uh I finished that body of work um and that was uh published as this book.

[00:17:50]Now 10 years is a long time and there's certainly a lot I would change uh now and certainly there's been a huge amount of discoveries and wonderful new evidence and data and and all sorts of things that mean that I would probably change a lot of the interpretations perhaps around things to do dating and phasing and and things like that. But I'm still quite proud of it as a piece of work.

[00:18:15]So where are we now? Moving on to the kind of state of play with the Nessa Brogue as it is now and the decorated stones reassemblage so many stones and around 1100 something like that um say around 1100 I've not cataloged them all fully and um there will probably be some which will be discarded then there'll probably be ones that come in as well as they get found during um envir in environmental samples or rec cataloged from different categories of finds or all these sorts of things. It's huge. The biggest assemblage of architectural uh rock art from the Neolithic anywhere in Northwest Europe and it's everywhere on the site.

[00:19:04]And it is really is everywhere. It's found in every context, every type of context, in every type of structure at the Nessa Broga.

[00:19:13]still in situ walls, in floor deposits, everywhere.

[00:19:19]And in terms of the type of uh marks and type of artwork we've got on the site or types of stone working and attention, a whole suite of different um types of processes of stonework.

[00:19:34]got pick dressing, pecking, chiseling, cut marking, grinding, drilling, incizing, carving, polishing, painting, etc., etc., just everything you might think of. Um, now there's also other kind of interesting kind of categories of stone as well, which I'll kind of touch upon uh later. There's also stones with natural markings and some with uh worked stones that are also have decoration that also perhaps fall into this kind of category.

[00:20:08]And just to have some pretty pictures up of kind of show some of the range of the assemblage. Um some of the stones are massive, really really huge. This is a 30 cm scale. So you can see that the stone itself is around is is getting up to about 40 cmters. Really huge uh from structure 10 uh from one of the corners inside uh the building. And you know it's such an amazing design. There's no wonder it was chosen for the bags and the t-shirts and the rest of it. And it really lends itself to it. These kind of uh triangles, each one of them uh filled with a slightly different pattern in the same way that the bands on the broadcast stone are all different. So it's kind of quite lovely in that way. So really huge pieces and some really small pieces. This is a just look at that scale. That's two centimeters. It's absolutely tiny. And this is something that came up. Cesily, who does our environmental samples is incredible. She can spot the tiniest things. She's so so skilled at picking this material up. And uh just look at the kind of size of that and the patterning on it. So really quite amazing. So some big pieces and some small pieces.

[00:21:29]There are some really interesting designs which really get your head kind of going and thinking well what what does it mean? Is it a kind of something to do with counting? Is it you know there's you can really kind of run wild with your imagination. These have all been drilled. These little holes are all around a centimeter in diameter and they've been drilled quite quite easy to do.

[00:21:53]And some bigger uh sort of cut marks as well. Uh this of course is from one of the peers in structure uh uh 12 or all or the building under it. I'm not quite sure. Um uh sadly this is one of the ones that we had to leave on site uh because quite simply in 2024 um it was not possible to demolish the entire site to get every single stone out. So many of these stones have been uh recorded um you know preservation by record if you like rather than in reality.

[00:22:29]and other cut mark stones. This really intriguing one that was in the entrance way to structure 10 with kind of something like about 35 uh cups ground into it of different sizes. It's a different number every time you count them. Honestly, there's something kind of strange going on with this stone. And it's really quite quite an unusual stone for the site as well.

[00:22:54]And so lots of different forms of stonework. Um the middle one on the top there is chiseled. These are all kind of uh and um and then the uh the top right one is a and the the both the stones on the right are bass relief uh pick dressing where certain areas have been left proud of the rest of the stone to kind of create a kind of um a relief effect and you know very very kind of sophisticated stonework techniques. And in terms of a British context, you only really see this um at uh pretty much one other site, Barl Claudio Garus.

[00:23:30]Apologies to any Welsh speakers here for my mangling of that, the passage grave in Anglesy.

[00:23:40]So how can we start to kind of unpick all of this kind of huge assemblage, lots of different types of stones, lots of diff found everywhere, etc. Well, we what we have at the Nessa Broggera is context and context is really of course the archaey's best friend because this is what gives us the upper hand in really trying to find out what is going on. We're able to unpick the strategraphy and the chronology of individual stones and think about when they were placed and when they were um uh appreciated uh during site.

[00:24:17]So thinking about uh where stones are placed and uh key questions of that and some of the contexts are really interesting. Uh this stone for uh for example is actually made up of several pieces of stone uh all put in a kind of uh clothing deposit in a entrance way of the annex of structure 12 at the end of that particular uh structures life. And uh so and this is you know that kind of really iconic kind of symbol of the Brogga butterfly there which is almost kind of I don't know unsettling in in in its kind of uh strikingness I think.

[00:25:00]But across the site we find uh concentrations uh in in similar places to where we might do with passage graves as well with entrances being particular focus uh for decoration. This is the entrance way to structure one.

[00:25:16]And you see it's absolutely covered in uh different types of markings uh from kind of lightly insized patterns uh to the kind of rosette pattern shown on uh that stone on the bottom right there.

[00:25:31]And this is something we see again and again in all sorts of Neolithic buildings is the entranceways uh form a particular focus of attention. And not just Neolithic buildings as well. You go to almost any building of any period, you will find graffiti or marks or protection marks or something around entrances.

[00:25:51]Okay.

[00:25:53]So, and what these sort of contexts tell us certainly is that a lot of these stones were made for display.

[00:26:03]And this is uh the dresser in structure 10. um absolutely mind-blowing piece of kind of uh furniture or whatever you want to call it, structural feature would have been absolutely beautiful in its day. Um and is became a beautiful ruin when we were excavating it. Um the central red sandstone pillar been picked dressed all over and that would have hit the light as you entered through structure 10 and would have almost glowed. Can you imagine what that was like?

[00:26:35]And the stone on the right big pictures uh uh yellow sandstone here as well with bass relief uh carving on it as well.

[00:26:47]Would have been a really beautiful uh structure and we know that the Neolithic stone carvers were very skilled in not only selecting these materials but also in working them to bring out the best of their qualities. So with the red and yellow uh sandstones for example, pick dressing them really brings to life the color within them and actually talking about bringing them to life might well have been uh part of uh that process carving them.

[00:27:14]So we can think about color and having color at the Nessa. Again another mindblowingly unique thing that the nest has um painted stones pigments. Wow. you know, um, but the, uh, picture on the right there isn't from the nest. That's a stone pot from Scar Bray. It's in Stromus Museum, and it's one of the many finds, uh, from Scar Bray. Uh, that was when the stones stone pots that had pigment inside them when they were found. So, we'd always known that it was a possibility that people were using pigment in this way. But only at the Nessa Broga did it appear on the walls and also on the pots as well.

[00:27:58]Okay, so these things were obviously meant to be seen and uh designed for maximum visible uh visual impact.

[00:28:09]But at other parts of the site, the visibility was not perhaps the main concern. And in fact, there's a bit of a paradox with some of the stones on the site is that the ones that are in the most visible conditions and the ones which seem to have had the most um intense uh carving and attention on them, um such as these ones, uh the pictures on the right hand side here are I've digitized the lines in to show the intensity of carving on them. They're actually almost invisible unless you have the light just right. So there's a kind of paradox of where the most attention on the stone doesn't necessarily equate to it being the most visible.

[00:28:55]And I find this quite interesting because I think it shows you it kind of challenges what we think of as art being meant to be seen. And maybe there's something else going on there.

[00:29:05]And this became uh most clear of all when we were excavating um structure seven.

[00:29:14]Uh structure seven and structure 19 kind of uh kind of quite not much surviving of them. Kind of little structures in the sites. When we excavated them, we knew that there were some stones with uh visible uh decoration on them. And that's these ones shown on the right.

[00:29:34]And all of that decoration formed a particular form on the edge of the stone facing inwards to the building and um appeared to have sequences of repeated uh decoration on them. But when we excavated build this this uh small bit of walling realized that a lot of the stones had hidden decoration as well.

[00:29:58]And whilst you might expect that any building would reuse a lot of stone from earlier structures for example, the differential nature of the hidden art on these stones kind of suggests something else. Because with the stones with the hidden art, it was tended to be singular motifs. So the act of a single event of inscription if you like and even more than that it appeared to be made on the uppermost surface of the stone but after at least one stone had been placed on top and that's what's shown in the shaded bit here. So you can see that the carving has been made on the space available that doesn't have a stone on top.

[00:30:42]And for me this suggested that actually with some of these carvings at least they were carving as they were building perhaps as a form of ownership mason's marks perhaps or perhaps part of an ongoing conversation with a team of builders or perhaps kind of uh secret messages to bestow kind of uh protection on the building. We don't know, but it's certainly an insight into the way that these marks are sometimes made as part of the practice of construction itself.

[00:31:14]When we came to uh excavate structure 11, we kind of we had the opportunity to test this theory. And sure enough, um the stones with uh the visible decoration, it was all on the outer face, all these repeated kind of sequences of attention. and the stones with the hidden decoration were like this singular motifs on the uppermost surface of the stone and then so something quite interesting happening there.

[00:31:45]Um so I've often been quite fascinated by these hidden stones and what they kind of uh might suggest to us about what's going on on site and certainly that's hopefully going to um be more of a focus um as I do more work.

[00:32:02]Here we go.

[00:32:03]But it's also a bit of a cautionary tale because this wall uh for example which is the uh outer no inner face of the it's the inside uh robbed out face of one of the inner walls of structure. It's quite hard to explain with the double skinned walls and it's the kind of yes it's the outer face of the kind of uh inner inner skin if you like that structure eight behind where all those people are and it had two very nice uh hidden stones in it.

[00:32:37]But whereas the lovely one on the right appears to have been broken but then incorporated into the heart of the structure anyway uh when it was being built. The one on the left the carving appears to have only been made once that whole stretch of walling was actually exposed during robbing much much later hundreds of years later in fact.

[00:33:02]So we have this kind of strange situation where these stones are the same context number. They belong to the same wall. So so I guess kind of on paper they're the same phase yet they were probably decorated hundreds of years apart. And this is kind of the sort of complications we you know kind of pick apart in archaeology that actually make it quite interesting even if it's bit of a challenge.

[00:33:27]But again, being at the NES allows us to have those sort of conversations and pick apart this data in a way that no other site can do because it just simply doesn't have the same level of um chronological and stratographic information that we have at the NES.

[00:33:44]Okay, I need to whiz on a bit, don't I?

[00:33:48]So, anyway, questions um about the site.

[00:33:52]Some of the biggest questions about all of these carvings um around are around style. What does it mean to have kind of cross and loenes or u just lozenes or triangles or these banded decorations?

[00:34:06]What do they mean? You know what how can we interpret them? And it's certainly a challenge and picking apart kind of what these different motifs might mean uh across the site. Do they relate to certain buildings and things is really interesting. Now, one thing I've found is that um there seems to be a concentration of certain types of marks in certain areas of the site, but not necessarily um to specific buildings.

[00:34:34]So, for example, structure um 8 has a lot of banded decoration and so does structure 17 and 18 which underly it.

[00:34:44]And that suggests of course that perhaps that there's a lot of reuse of material from those earlier structures being used in structure 8. But it's also quite curious that that reuse doesn't expand out to other buildings so much. It seems to be fairly contained. So there's something interesting going on there.

[00:35:00]And this is something that uh requires a lot more picking apart than me just saying that anecdotally.

[00:35:08]But yes, questions of style. What do they mean? And just another uh closeup there of that wonderful stone from structure 10 with its fantastic uh triangles.

[00:35:21]Now, one of the most exciting things about the stage of post excavation that we're moving in now has been the incredible work that the triage team, the pot people have been doing on all the ceramics in the site. And um and I I would I haven't got a more upto-ate picture to to explain that, but they've been doing fantastic work on this really complicated uh assemblage of pottery.

[00:35:44]For me, I'm really interested to see how the designs on the grooved wear pottery, the different motifs might relate to the different motifs we find in the stone.

[00:35:54]Are there a kind of identity motifs that relate to different structures or are they found across the sites? You know, how do these things um relate to one another?

[00:36:05]And how can we think about these different motifs? This some of the banded uh decoration shown on this picture. Um, and again from really large stones to really quite small ones and including um this one here which is uh that one I showed you the right hand one which was hidden in the wall of structure 8 and uh also known as Georgie's stone and Ola will be very familiar with this because it ended up being the inspiration for a lovely range of jewelry um as well.

[00:36:38]And so these wonderful banded uh patterns are really quite intriguing to me and of course they relate right back to the broader stone and also they have parallels in sites like maze how as well. So this is really fascinating to kind of think about these and to pick them apart.

[00:36:55]So is there a meaning to different motifs? We simply don't know and actually is almost impossible to work that out. Um I get contacted regularly normally by retired engineers and mathematicians who think they've figured it out and um but quite simply I don't think these designs can be necessarily read like a language. They don't ne necessarily fit all the kind of markers for different languages that we have.

[00:37:21]And that's even with um putting it through various bits of software. And of course there's you know been lots of great developments with uh lots of early uh languages uh quite recently.

[00:37:32]But the other thing that speaks about them not being a language as such is that many of the stones from the site um have not just one motif carved on them but layers and layers and layers and layers on top of one another. And that means that if there is a kind of meaning residing in a particular motif then that meaning doesn't stay static for long. It can be defaced, augmented, changed, altered. So that meaning must be able to be fluid and changeable.

[00:38:07]So and my example for that is this quite wonderful stone. You can just see how much is going on here. We've got kind of these finely insized lines. There's cut marks. There's deeply carved motifs and more besides going on there. And I like to kind of think about what's going on with this stone. Did one person carve one bit then pass it to somebody next to them? Or was there actually maybe weeks, months, years that went by between those different acts of inscription and carving and looking at the stone? We don't know. Again, it's one of those challenges is trying to unpick duration and time in archaeology.

[00:38:53]Um, even with the Broadka stone, there are similar sequences of attention because there's not just the carvings on the edge of the uh stone's face there, but there's also these uh cut marks, these pet designs as well, which are very deliberate. And you can see even on that uh left hand band there, it's almost like the there there's a space uh within there for that cut mark. It's it's very deliberate. For years that was just dismissed as damage and not including any any illustrations or anything but it's very much a deliberate part of marking the stone and that opens up all these thinkings to think about process and material. So we can that's your hands Chris actually I think. Yeah.

[00:39:42]So Chrising his wonderful kind of um reconstruction work there carving on on the edge of the stone. Um so because if we move away from thinking about motifs having meaning, we can open up to think about working processes and uh um things as well and it opens up the bigger picture to thinking about materials and how people choose them, how they work them and all these um different kind of conversations around stone.

[00:40:10]And there was certainly so I mean the people who work the stone at the nest really knew what they were doing. They knew where to get the best stone. They knew where to quarry it. They knew the best kind of size pieces to have it in um to work with it. They knew how to dress it and carve it to bring out the best of its qualities and then how to place it in positions for the biggest impact whether that impact was visible or not.

[00:40:41]Okay.

[00:40:43]So challenges perhaps um lots of challenges to do with chronology and context but also that's the strength of the site of the Nessa Broga that's the kind of richness of what we have um but it's a very complicated assemblage um not least because these are artifacts as well as architecture so they need to be kind of treated in a slightly different way than other uh types of find on the site but what we need when we're thinking about these um decorative pieces is a kind of multi-layered approach. It's not enough to just look at motifs or materials or types of working or context. We have to look at all of those things together and how they interact with one another.

[00:41:29]So, what we need to do is kind of zoom in and um I like this phone. It's not it's not a very high resolution picture, but you can see it's uh can you see that circular kind of bit there where my things it's like somebody's been really frustrated and just gone like that. Like I don't know, maybe you've never done that with a bro, but I know I have.

[00:41:52]And um so we need to zoom in to the kind of sort of real micro strategraphy of the stone surfaces and think about them and try and unpick those different layers of carving. And to do that, you know, kind of make use of a lot of different recording techniques that we're able to do nowadays.

[00:42:10]And maybe we could identify particular tools or even individual carvers, which would be quite amazing, wouldn't it?

[00:42:17]Um but we also at the same time need to zoom out and think about the bigger picture how the Nessabrogger relates to other sites in Orcne and also uh beyond Ornne as well and think about that wider geographical context and also the wider geological context as well. Thinking about not only where the materials for the decorated stone comes from but also how it might reference the landscape as well and how those interactions happen. Um this particular stone here has got what looks at first sight to be a carved uh posed triangle or sult motif on it. It's actually natural that kind of uh cross uh fisher in it. It's placed in the entrance way of uh in as a door jamb in one of the annex uh walls of structure 10. It's been placed in exactly the same sort of position that we'd expect a carved stone to be placed in. So perhaps there was no distinction between something being geological or human-made, you know, so there's bigger questions there.

[00:43:21]And we see that in other sites as well.

[00:43:23]This is a closeup of a stone found at Scarra in the 1973 excavations. And just look at those lozenes. I mean, it's just incredible. And you know, anyone who's walked on the shore in Ornne will be very familiar with those uh shapes because that's exactly the sort of shapes we find in the bedrock in Ornne.

[00:43:45]And I'm not saying it's directly representational, but for people who carved stone, who quarried stone, who walked on bedrock, there's a kind of immersive perception. These shapes, these types of working, and the breaking of stone would have been part of their world. So, it's perhaps no surprise that we see these patterns.

[00:44:05]Sorry, I'm gonna get a wiggle on. I realize I'm holding up one back from the uh raffle as well.

[00:44:15]Um, and this is I was saying to Nick um just as we came in that it's a real challenge with the nest to kind of get not so many slides because it's very easy to have 300 slides of amazing stones because there's so many things to look at. So I had to boil it down to my my top five favorite stones, something like that. But this is one of them.

[00:44:38]And just saying about those patterns we see on the shore, those kind of uh natural fracture lines, those lodenes that we see so much in Ornne. And if you can see, they're just on this stone as well. And this is absolutely one of my favorite, maybe even top three stones from the site. Um and this was found, it's one of those lovely rounded hearts that we all like to pick up on the beach. And certainly um when Stacy who found it uh picked it up in his hand, that's not his hand by the way. It's Dan's hand. But Stacy found it. It didn't look like anything but a very nice beach pebble, which still, by the way, wouldn't have belonged at the nest.

[00:45:19]Still would have been brought there even if it wasn't decorated. But as he turned it in his hand, the light hit it and it illuminated. And I don't know how visible they are on the screen there, but it's absolutely covered in thisly fine latis patterns of intersecting lozenes just like you see on that stone scarab just like you see on the bedrock on the shore in Ornne and so it's almost like a little pocket bit of the landscape that you could carry around so there's questions of scale here from the geological from the vast to the archeological to the site to the building to the artifact to something you can perhaps hold in your hand so big questions and how they all fit together.

[00:46:06]And I don't know all the answers, but it's fun trying to find them out. Um, so very much in the post excavation stage now, trying to deal with all these huge numbers of uh stones and there really are lots and lots and lots of them. Um, oh look, the old shed. Oh, so there's a nice shiny new shed now. See? Um, lots of challenges as we go forward with kind of postex stage. uh quite a few stones had to be left in situ uh in 2024 because um there was simply at the bottom of huge walls we couldn't you know could not extricate them and they survive only in record there are huge numbers of records I personally have thousands of photographs of the stones there are thou every lots of other people have thousands of photographs as well there are drawings there are plans there are all these huge amounts of material that needs to be brought together because the stones are often part of uh architectural features like walls. They often were first uh identified in say 2007 and then it was only in 2024 or something that then we kind of finally removed them because of the nature of them. So often they have multiple small fine numbers from different excavation years. So this is all a kind of you know this kind of admin task of like spreadsheets and numbers flying all over the place that we have to do as well.

[00:47:33]And of course so much uh knowledge has kind of about the site and about how it all fits together um has kind of changed as well since uh 2006. So contexts have changed, structure numbers have changed.

[00:47:47]What we might have thought was kind of structure 8 has become structure 17 or or something like that. You know this happens all over the sites. is part of the process of excavation and finding things out, but it means that there's a lot of records that need to be kind of tallied up. So, a huge amount of work there and a practical consideration. A lot of the stones are really heavy and really awkward and it's a quite a lot of work to do them. But yes, the end of an era and um but uh as Jean is sign said in her window uh the work continues um and I'm just about wrapping up. So um what I started this talk with 2006 and and I was kind of there when the first stone was found although I don't I didn't really appreciate the significance of it to be honest at the time um only with hindsight and I was also lucky enough to be there when the final decorated stone came out on the site in 2024 and I think the look on my face says it all because it was a it was quite a crazy moment and um with time team filming and there are huge numbers of people because it was the kind of final throws of the excavation but lots of excitement and so lots of work and I'm looking forward to getting stuck into it all when I I can kind of finally find the time maybe. Um but on that note saying about time team in the final hours all I've got to do now is put in a plug for the what's happening next. Uh, and that's lots of excitement because there's the premiere of the film uh next week, week after, two weeks ago. What's that? Week on Friday. Week next Friday.

[00:49:30]Two weeks tomorrow. Yeah, sorry. And so, lots of excitement. And then even better, there's going to be um digging on site as well. So, lots and lots and lots to look forward to. And um and I think finally, I'm glad to know that's me. So, thank you What a treat. What a treat. Thank you so much for that. Um think it's absolutely amazing to to get an insight into the post excavation process.

[00:50:12]This the thrill of finding things um is great. The thrill of publish them is great, but it's the meanderings that go from one to the other that are really the highlights. Um, and um, it's very good to see part of that process. It's the often the area that people forget about and it's the area which costs money. By the way, just saying um, post excavation is not necessarily very sexy, but it costs and it's really good that to raise funds for that. So um you know good luck with that all the nest project here um and good luck with the um forthcoming things that we can see now um there are no doubt several questions and what we're going to do is I'm going to ask for if you could just raise your hand if you have a question and then our our glamorous assistant here will rush around with the microphone um so that everybody can can hear what is being asked. So do we have any any takers for questions?

[00:51:16]I don't believe that. So, think again.

[00:51:18]Right. So, yes, there's a lady at the front here.

[00:51:28]Thank you very much, Antonio. This may be a dumb question, but did you find anything that sort of looked like a person or a cow or or you know anything that you or fish or any sort of recognizable shapes like that?

[00:51:44]>> Oh, thanks Alex. That's actually a really interesting question because we often talk about there not being much in or or hardly any representational art in the Neolithic. But one way of thinking about it is it's maybe not representational in the way we're tuned to thinking and perhaps it is. But of course there is um as I said that kind of link with perhaps natural features.

[00:52:07]Um there are carvings in the rounds.

[00:52:09]There are figurines including Budd. Oh, I nearly wore my Buddho earrings actually, but including Buddha. Go to Stromus Museum and see wellb carving.

[00:52:17]There are examples of figurative art from the Neolithic.

[00:52:21]Um and there are of course in the homopy um south tomb there are uh that kind of uh what look like eyes and eyebrows which are very similar to uh the westy wifey's eyes and eyebrows and the horn spirals that we get at the nest are very much they're called horn spirals because they're like the horns on a on a ram.

[00:52:44]They're kind of you know they so they could very much have a kind of animal link as well. So I I yeah I wonder whether there there is representational art but we're not maybe always recognizing it. Um but it is an interesting question because it has been debated whether there was a taboo a bit like a kind of you know a taboo against living sort of things which is possible as well.

[00:53:08]Thank you very much. There was another hand in this area over here.

[00:53:13]Yes. Next time, can I just say just before we're waiting for Katie to to start that um the publication of your thesis is a definite must readad. Read a lot of thesis in my time and they're not usually very readable, but this is a great one. 10 years ago, so like I say, I would probably change quite a lot of it, but it's and there's been lots better things written by other people since then. But there was it's it's open access. You can you can just download the PDF and decide yourselves.

[00:53:44]>> And it's readable. That's the point.

[00:53:45]It's very readable. Katie, sorry.

[00:53:48]>> We we used your a bit of your PhD at the Yak, was it amaz? And we had a print out and we were going around finding all the carvings. Um I wanted to know about you know how you were talking about um structure 8 the in the rubble that one of the carvings was made during the kind of robbing of of it. How how do you know that or what makes you think that >> or after? Um so it was uh the bits it was facing out from related actually to structure seven and 19 and formed uh because that wall had gone. So we know from the deposits up against that bit of robbed out wall uh where it would have been and it would have been and it faced a stone that was a pillar that also had drilled marks in it. And so maybe a bit of conjecture there, but kind of absolutely seemed to relate to a space that had been made when um that wall had been robbed out as against that really beautiful stone with the deep carvings on the edge which quite clearly had been broken probably probably devastatingly broken actually because it was so beautiful but was incorporated into the wall and that was very definitely part incorporated into the wall when it was built. So there is a different thing going on there. Yeah.

[00:55:05]Thank you.

[00:55:08]>> Anyone else?

[00:55:10]Have anybody?

[00:55:12]Yes. So, one at the front.

[00:55:16]>> Thanks. I was just wondering in terms of the patterning that you have within the the stones themselves. Obviously, the nest span quite a long period of time.

[00:55:25]Do any of the patterns represent particular periods of time? And if they do, is there a continuity between them or is it in your view is there quite a bit to it such that it's very difficult to understand where the patterns are coming from in that sense?

[00:55:41]>> Yeah. Um and that's a really good question and and um a lot of sites have kind of and certainly there's been a lot of work done on the Irish sites on this sort of um chronology of different types of marking. There's a very clearly uh kind of sequence where the inciz marks are the earliest and then the kind of uh pick dressing comes uh later and we we might see that a bit at the nest but there's so much reuse of stone that it's really there's a lot to unpick because um there are buildings on top of buildings on top of buildings and the depth of strategraphy and the amount of reuse is is quite complicated. So that's certainly one thing to look at is whether that style relates to chronology in that way and I think it it it does to a certain extent. Uh certainly uh cut marks seems to be a bit later and that would fit with a wider patterning but I think like everything at the nest it's not as straightforward or as simple as we might hope it to be because it's just such an incredible site. It's really complicated kind of story with all the material.

[00:56:50]>> Do we have any further questions?

[00:56:53]>> Not much to ask.

[00:56:55]>> Thank you. Um you mentioned the couple of techniques of rock picking and I think you were rock drilling I think you mentioned. Could you expand a little on the techniques that that were used to make those grooves um and the rock drilling how how that was?

[00:57:10]>> Yeah. So um most of the uh designs on the site are insized or carved. They're they're made with flint >> and so either you can it's quite um easy to carve the stone generally in orny.

[00:57:26]It's you know it's quite soft. You can carve it with flint and you go more and more and you'll get a nice deep carved line. Uh the drilling can be done uh very easily with a a stick or even a lobster claw or or even a bit of flint as well. Just simply rotating it and and that's quite easy to do in Yeah. Um the pick dressing. Um so talking about um direct percussion, so probably holding a hammerstone and uh hitting the uh face of the sandstone. So just having a harder uh hammerstone onto the soft red and yellow sandstone and just doing that all over. So that's a kind of form a direct cushion is uh with the hammerstone. Chiseling is um you've got another tool in there as well. So normally a bit of flint and a hammerstone on the flint onto the um onto the stone. So there's um different stages and different tools as well. and should say, I don't want to put Chris on the spot, but he's an excellent stone carver and very good at reconstructing all of these techniques, so knows a huge amount about this.

[00:58:35]>> Thank you.

[00:58:37]>> We're at the back.

[00:58:49]>> Can you tell us where was that found and who is it now?

[00:58:54]Uh well, I don't know where it is now. It's probably um in um somewhere. It's a treasure, so it's probably somewhere very safe. Um but uh I think that was actually one of the um finds that was actually found not from a a distinctive context within the the buildings because it is quite small. And also probably Yeah, we have time for one last one. Yes, we just wait for the mic. Thank you.

[00:59:30]>> Uh, yes. I'm just curious because you mentioned a few pieces of rock art from other places in Orcne. Is there anything similar from Barn House being that it's so close by?

[00:59:40]>> Yeah. Um, there's one really big stone that's actually in Oakley Museum that has a really a really big stone, but a small area of it has got a really nice carving on it, but Barn House was sadly very plow truncated and did not have the same level of walls standing as at the nest. I mean it we can imagine that it probably looks like the nest very you know and um and certainly the outlines of the the walls seem like that but unfortunately they didn't have the same level of survival preservation but you can go to a new museum and see a big stone from far house.

[01:00:20]Any further comments?

[01:00:24]>> Right. Well just just wrapping it up. Um I think we we've been very privileged to have a master class in artifact studies.

[01:00:31]I would say the process of artifact work is is uh very um detailed and really very significant and I I thank you for presenting your thoughts and even though they will change as you work through it um it's really good to see the thought process. I'd also like to just briefly give a plug for your web page and regular updates for uh for the nest which most people in here will be aware of but if you're not just go and throw it around on the internet and you can see these regular updates with wonderful photographs. I would recommend it that you have a look at that. So for now I'd just like to say thank you very much to Antonia before we we go for the raffle but we we'll thank you first. I think it's most important. So um thank you Come down.