Surfacing Read online

  You don’t have to be an archaeologist to know the oil age won’t last half as long as the Neolithic did.

  Hazel went on. ‘An alternative is to run it as a field school, with inexperienced diggers, but the effort of managing them, keeping them safe ... Having people “engaged” takes more time and energy than the actual work.’

  ‘So. It just gets buried in the sand?’

  ‘It won’t be buried. That’s the trouble. If it was all packed with sand again, it would be safe. But these structures are exposed now, so the wind will soon destroy them.’

  Does this matter, is the question. Do we want to know how it was to be human, here, five thousand years ago? Do we want to know where we’re coming from as we cruise into the future? What we were, or might be again? How we ‘engaged,’ if that’s the word, how we configured our relationship with the rest of the natural world, with the planet.

  Back on site, the conversation turned cheerfully cataclysmic. Dan, Anna and I kneeled in our row, scraped away the Bronze Age soil, and talked about climate change, about the global forces and corporations we feel powerless to resist.

  We spoke about an oil rig which had broken loose in a storm and run aground on Lewis, how it was still sat there weeks later, still leaking oil.

  Dan said, ‘All it would take is one almighty meteor strike. One huge volcanic eruption, and we’d be back in the Stone Age.’

  ‘It looks alright,’ I said, flippantly. ‘The Stone Age. Snug wee houses, sea views. Beef and oysters. Some weird ceremonial stuff now and again. A short life, but a life...’

  ‘But we’d know how to do it! Your average Joe wouldn’t. Your average Joe in the city.’

  Dan plugged himself back into his iPod and worked on. He had the enclosure wall to deal with and, in its lee, many flints. His patch was covered in little polythene bags, each containing a bit of flint. Anna and I, just a metre further into the enclosure, had only brown earth which yielded occasional small morsels of bone. I pretended outrage when Hazel came by. ‘Miss! It’s not fair! He’s getting all these finds, and we’re not.’

  Hazel’s answer seemed visionary. She glanced and said, ‘They must have been sitting on the wall, flint-knapping.’

  Sat right there on their village wall in the afternoon sunshine, working and chatting. I almost saw them.

  The next day, Graeme was more chipper. It was the end of the week, and things were coming together. The JCB had gone, the enclosure wall was found, there were indeed newly discovered structures within it.

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to excavate them. That’s our job. Dig into them and scoop ’em out. And then we’ll run for the hills.’

  * * *

  * * *

  Friday night was pub night. The island’s only hotel has a small plain public bar with a jukebox and WiFi. We fell into two tribes: Westray farmers at the bar, in overalls and workboots; half a dozen archaeologists in their corner, scrubbed up nicely in clean T-shirts, sat on seats and banquettes. The two tribes were not unfriendly, not unknown to each other after so many seasons, just different. There were the archaeologists, all from elsewhere, who lived shifting lives of much travel, and there were farmers who had remained largely on their ancestral lands, often for generations.

  Some of the archaeologists were already having to think about their next job, their next temporary home, and had laptops and tablets open as they filled in application forms and funding bids.

  In due course, though, the laptops were folded away and Criostoir put money in the jukebox and pub-talk and stories came out, wisecracks and nonsense. Hazel and Graeme arrived and for some reason the talk turned to ghosts. It surprised me how many of these practical-minded folks were open to the idea of ghosts. No one scoffed. Maybe the open-mindedness and lack of dogma they have to maintain at work persisted into other aspects of life and death. And all that imagining the past. The Irish ones spoke of banshees. Criostoir said only people with clan names beginning Mac or O’ could hear a banshee, and some still did, sure, the night before a death. Knockings and sounds.

  But no one had heard of a Neolithic ghost, never a prehistoric presence, though they lived all day among their earthly remains. Ghosts have a half-life, it seems, lingering just a few hundred years, till they too fade away.

  It was full moon or near enough, and I had to cycle over the island to reach the old house on the hill where I was staying. Dark roads between quiet fields, and fields of restless geese, and glimpses of moonlit sea. For the last mile the house was silhouetted against a moon-filled sky. Sandy and Willie were away that weekend. I was to be alone in the eight-times-blessed empty rooms, aside from one ghost-white cat.

  Did the Links people believe in ghosts? They certainly needed their dead. Consider all the chambered cairns Neolithic people built, with crawl-ways and low lintels, strange bone-houses concerned with the proper treatment of their ancestors. Cairns that fell out of use and out of memory, but lingered in the landscape to become the haunt of the fairy folk.

  The weather changed during the night; I woke towards dawn and looked out the window to see rain slanting over the fields, over the old burial mound. By the garden walls around the house, the dog-rose bushes thrashed their white flowers.

  * * *

  * * *

  The most famous find yet from Links of Noltland was discovered in 2009, not long after the dig began. That means she was late in the sequence, as they say. She came from a time more recent than they are working on now.

  When the rain cleared, I went to the Westray Heritage Centre in Pierowall especially to see this find; she is on display there. The Heritage Centre is two conjoined rooms, recently built. The left-hand room is given to artefacts from the island’s past, the right to some natural history, a mock-up of a sea-cliff with model birds, and some gifts and knitwear and books of local interest.

  In the historical side, the Links of Noltland dig has a small section of its own. A video is played on a loop, with a slightly younger Hazel on camera, in explanatory mode. In the few years since the film was made, already much has changed.

  I looked in the few glass cases, at bone pins for clothing, some flint and stone tools, the skull of a horned cow. Then came some Viking objects, bone combs. There was a straw-backed Orkney chair and some farming implements but I couldn’t find the ‘Westray Wife,’ so I asked the attendant at his desk. His accent was from the Midlands of England, a place he had clearly left behind.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘lots of people miss her. She’s in the glass case, right in the centre of the room.’

  I’d missed her, because the ‘Westray Wife’ was tiny, a veritable Thumbelina.

  I peered through the glass of the tall plinth to see a figurine formed of the island’s reddish sandstone, only four centimetres high. Just an oval head on a blocky body, but that’s all it takes to make a human figure. She has dots for eyes and one zigzag eyebrow, and scratches that suggest a nose but no mouth, but these features are hard to discern through glass.

  On her torso are inscribed two circles which may suggest breasts, so giving her gender, but they sit high, nearer her collarbones. Her stone body is inscribed with fine lines, like those on the palm of your hand. They may or may not suggest clothing. She is not like the fat and funky Paleolithic ‘Venus’ figures that have been found across Europe; if anything, she is sweet and unassuming. She spent five thousand years buried among the rubble of a building, which had itself then been buried under half a metre of domestic refuse. ‘Buried,’ though, is possibly the wrong word. There’s a suggestion that the figurine was placed in the rubble deliberately, to formally ‘close’ the building.

  The ‘Westray Wife’ is the earliest representation we have of a human, in the UK, and she has become a motif for the site, almost a tourist attraction, if tourists can be drawn to a sandstone figure not four centimetres high on a faraway island.

  Which they can. The
attendant showed me a little booklet where they note visitor numbers to the Centre. The year following the arrival of the ‘Westray Wife,’ visitor numbers doubled. She is the island’s oldest and most famous inhabitant. Whatever she was intended to do, five thousand years ago, she is potent again, in her glass box on a plinth, ancestral and watchful.

  Three more figurines have since been discovered at Links, and others are now appearing on other Neolithic sites. One has come out of the dig at Ness of Brodgar on the Orkney mainland, and another, made of whalebone, has been rediscovered, after careful searching, in an old box in the store of Stromness museum. The whalebone figure was originally from Skara Brae.

  As is so often the case, it’s a matter of looking, of knowing what you’re looking for.

  None is as tiny as the ‘Westray Wife,’ with her curious zigzag eyebrow.

  When the figurine was discovered, a researcher noted a similarity between her eye-dots under their brow and certain carvings on a lintel inside a chambered cairn on Papa Westray. There, similar eyes are carved on a stone in the deep dark.

  Also in the Heritage Centre is the Neolithic Westray Stone. It’s in a glass case on the floor of the foyer, as if they didn’t know quite what to do with it. The stone is four foot long, eighteen inches high. A digger driver found it in the nearby quarry – or half of it. The stone had broken along its horizontal axis. This was around 1980. Archaeologists were called in and soon found the other half. The stone had come, they were sure, from a chambered cairn and had probably formed the lintel above the entrance passageway.

  The thing is, the stone is carved with deep, trancey spirals, paired spirals, with spandrels in between. Raised high, maybe in a nightclub, with the right sort of lighting, it would be powerful and unsettling.

  Eyes and spirals.

  * * *

  * * *

  The sun was out again. I strolled along the road. After the rain, the calm and huge skies, the pouring daylight, the birds and seals. The community garden held splashes of colour in sheltered nooks, nasturtiums, Livingstone daisies. I met Criostoir, the big lad with his rolling gait. ‘The weekends,’ he said. ‘So feckin borin’.’

  ‘You need to come to the store,’ said Graeme. ‘At the weekend come to the store. Come to our house, and we’ll take you.’

  Graeme and Hazel live in an old schoolhouse in the middle of the island with their son and Hazel’s elderly father. The classroom is still attached to the house. They were in their garden, lifting tatties, as I arrived, but the tatties had a species of blight. There was Hazel, a small Irish woman with a basket of blighted potatoes, a reminder of how marginal it all could be, this farming life.

  The old classroom is a large bleak rectangle. They have plans for its restoration, but for now the ceiling is falling in. Graeme pointed out how the windows were deliberately set too high to let the schoolchildren see out. No gazing at their island and their cattle and their seashores and their homes. What they got was reading, writing, arithmetic, and a fair dose of the Bible, until the bell rang. Small wonder they sailed for Australia.

  There was another shipping container in their grounds, and I half thought that might be the store they meant, so I was surprised when after our tea we piled into the site minibus and drove the four or five miles through Pierowall to Gill’s Pier, where crabs and fish are sent off and freight is landed. From the pier head, Graeme and Hazel led me a few yards up a rough track. A warehouse to the left was packed with sacks of imported animal foodstuffs. On the seaward side, however, stood a dark Victorian behemoth in stone, three storeys high, with gables facing the shore. Three rows of six-pane windows did nothing to lighten its appearance; it was like a Victorian mill. On its high roof stood ranks and ranks of lums. Graeme made for the door.

  I must have looked surprised and they laughed.

  ‘What were you expecting?’

  ‘Something the size of a garden shed, maybe. One of those nice old fishermen’s huts in town.’

  Graeme trundled aside the door and we entered into dust and gloom. Through filtered light from high windows, I saw plastic boxes stacked head high, and more boxes, and, through a partition, yet more. There were so many boxes that walkways had been created between them. Among the boxes, there were stones laid on pallets. But it was the smell that arrested me: the building held a pungent, musky mix of pitch, tarry rope, black-dark creosote, smoky things. Soot and fish. A wonderful low rich dark smell, a century old or more. It made me realise that the island is so wind-swept it is almost scentless.

  Huge beams supported the roof, hewn from trees such as you can’t find nowadays.

  ‘It was intended as a fish-drying place. They hung the fish from the rafters and then walked up and down with wheelbarrows full of smoking embers. Didn’t really work.’

  ‘No...’

  ‘But then, in just a few years steamships appeared and they could send the fish off quickly, so there was no need to preserve them. After that it was used for weaving, but that didn’t work, either. All the looms and equipment went off to the Western Isles.’

  Nothing left now but the smells. Such smells as are almost banished from the world, in a half-light, a barn-like light.

  The three of us were surrounded by plastic boxes. Through a gap in a partition I could see yet more boxes. Ten years’ worth, since the site began.

  ‘There’s more upstairs. It’s the biggest Neolithic assemblage in the UK,’ said Graeme. ‘I don’t think Historic Environment Scotland know what they have. They really don’t know what they’ve got here. It’s what would have come out of Skara Brae, if only they’d kept it. If people had recognised what they had back then. But here they have another chance...’

  Both began moving through the stacks selecting boxes to open, taking out objects to show me. I held polished mace-heads, chunky beads of stained and polished bone, bone pins for holding clothing, scrapers made from sheep’s knuckles.

  Graeme opened one particular box to show me a slender implement reminiscent of those nibbed pens we used at school, to practise joined-up handwriting. It could have come from his own schoolhouse.

  ‘You see how the tip is stained dark?’ He said. ‘We think it was used for tattooing.’

  ‘Now look at this,’ said Hazel. In a larger tub, laid on kitchen paper, lay a chunk of pottery two hand-spans wide, a broken fragment of what had been a sizeable pot. It had been incised with a deep and powerful spiral design.

  ‘Where have you seen that design before?’ asked Hazel.

  ‘The Westray Stone, in the Heritage Centre...’

  ‘... and in Ireland,’ said Hazel, in her Dublin accent. ‘The other place we are seeing these spirals is at the Bend of the Boyne, at Newgrange and Aboyne. You know that huge lintel stone there, at the tomb? We’re beginning to think the peoples here on Orkney came from various different areas. This design may mark the Links of Noltland people as different in identity from other groups, who favoured geometric designs. This is what we’re thinking. That there were different groups coming here from different places...’

  Hazel and Graeme showed me more beads, some made of animal teeth, and half-made beads, lots of beads. Thick pins of bone, as long as your hand, presumably used for fastening clothing.

  ‘But look – this pin is made of bone, it’s from a domestic animal, but see how it’s been shaped to look like antler? That’s a puzzle. We have these references to the wild...’

  For a moment, out of the twenty-first-century plastic boxes stacked in the gloomy Victorian store, there emerged a vision of people clothed in animal hides, bearing spiral-designed pots, with hair braided, hanging with beads, people crazy about cattle, young people prematurely old, as we would think now.

  Different groups, with their different clothing and accents, tools and designs arriving here. But very soon after their arrival, there would be no one alive who could remember the journey. Doubtless there were s
tories. Origin stories. Contact with other people of the same ilk, who spoke the same language, at other settlements. Great ceremonial gatherings, informed by movements of sun and moon, risings and settings, alignments of stones. The midwinter sunrise shines down the passageway at Newgrange, the midwinter sunset illuminates the inner tomb at Maeshowe.

  How did they know that, these kids of twenty or thirty years old, with their bone and stone tools?

  Spirals.

  You wonder what they did with that tattooing pen.

  Stone and stone, bone and bone.

  Not that there was nothing else, it’s just that all the other materials had simply rotted away: the soft hides, the clothing, the basketry of grass or straw. But there were suggestions of colour, minute traces of reds and greens on beads, even on walls, a sort of paint. There are frequent finds on site of ochre and haematite, which yield pigments of yellows and rust-reds.

  * * *

  * * *

  I was almost glad when we stepped outside again into the fresh air and Graeme rumbled the door closed. Accumulations make me anxious. What to do with it all? The boxes and boxes all stacked up, all yet to be catalogued, dealt with, written about, kept safe. The sheer cultural responsibility.

  Properly speaking it all belongs to the State – that is, to us the people, to the nation – but what does the State know about some plastic boxes filled with beads and bones in a Victorian store behind the pier on a faraway island, the stuff of five thousand years ago?

  ‘There’s enough here for thirty PhDs on bone alone,’ said Graeme. ‘Decades’ worth of work.’

  ‘I’d like to open some sort of centre here,’ said Hazel.

  They seemed remarkably sanguine about it all.

  The tide was way out as we drove away. In Gill’s Bay, the weedy shore was picked over by curlew and redshank. Out on the yellow sands, I saw a man with a metal detector. He was swaying the machine back and forth, as if it were some agricultural tool, maybe a scythe.