North Atlantic Research (NAR) projects

This archaeological project commenced at the end of June 2009 and centred on the island of Rousay. The research project formed a new international field school for the North Atlantic Biocultural Organisation (NABO) and complements others in the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland. NABO is a non-profit making research co-operative investigating human settlement and adaptation across the North Atlantic. Researchers are from Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, Faroes, Iceland, and North America.

The project is led by Steve Dockrill and Julie Bond from Archaeological Sciences, University of Bradford and Jane Downes, Ingrid Mainland and Julie Gibson from Orkney College, UHI.

Orkney offers some of the best archaeology in Northern Europe, as shown by the stone circle at Stenness, which forms part of the World Heritage Area (Heart of Neolithic Orkney). This rich archaeological resource provides an educational background to the students’ training.

The protected archaeology in the World Heritage Area forms the tip of an archaeological iceberg, with many Orcadian sites being endangered by coastal erosion. This situation will be exacerbated further by global warming and resulting sea level change. The eroding sites have huge research potential and are able to provide important archaeological and scientific data which can inform us on how people confronted the marginality of these northern islands in the past.

The archaeological information offered by these sites can be increased with intensive landscape survey (topographical and geophysical) together with targeted test pitting and selective excavation to answer key questions. These techniques introduce the student to a wide range of skills.

The excavations at Tofts Ness were published in 2007 by The Orcadian in association with Historic Scotland, and launched, with the accompanying Pool volumne in Orkney, firstly on Sanday, and then Kirkwall. 

Site development and chronology

The establishment of an integrated absolute chronology for Old Scatness is seen as being essential in order to provide a framework for the excavated data and to allow interpretation and understanding of questions surrounding the site’s past inhabitants, economic development and cultural identity.

Cultural change

The provision of an absolute chronology will facilitate the accurate dating of the structural and depositional sequence and allow factors such as cultural change to be viewed within a more precise chronological framework. Cultural interfaces such as that between Pictish and Viking deposits provide the opportunity to review questions of native/incomer interaction, absorption or replacement.

Economy, landscape/seascape interaction

The understanding of the economic exploitation of both the surrounding landscape for arable agriculture, animal husbandry and other economic resources (such as peat for fuel) together with the sea and seashore, is vital in understanding the site’s sustainability.

Formation of archaeological deposits & sediments

This theme is a subset of Economy, Landscape/Seascape Interaction and is also interlocked with Manufacture, Trade and Contact. An integrated research programme examining magnetic signatures, carbonised and fossilised organic components, phosphate and soil micromorphology is enabling an understanding of fuel exploitation, the identification of surfaces within structures, the formation and management of arable soils and providing evidence for deposits associated with ironworking.

Manufacture, trade and contact

Evidence for manufacture, such as copper alloy casting and ironworking, together with imported cultural material such as pottery and Roman glass, are providing evidence for both production and trade, which in turn provides further insight into the site’s status and how this might have changed over time.

Power, status and social hierarchies

The broch and defensive ditch, together with the post broch village, may be interpreted as being indicative of monumentality, control of wealth and status within a social system. Questions surrounding the accumulation or control of wealth and evidence for craft specialisation are being investigated within this theme.

Island of Unst

The island of Unst has a large number of longhouse sites of apparently Viking or Norse date, but these sites are rather enigmatic, seeming to consist of single phase dwellings with only a short occupation sequence.

In other parts of the Northern Isles, such single-period sites are largely absent and Viking settlement is usually identified within multi-period sites on good land with origins before Scandinavian settlement and often a long subsequent settlement history. This begs the question of why the Unst sites appear to be different. Are they perhaps the first move away from the primary settlements? If so, why were they subsequently abandoned?

Norse farms

Norse farms in these locations may have been environmentally vulnerable; soliflucation stripes and mountain-tundra soils can be seen on the Keen of Hamar, just 20m above a longhouse site. Or did the rise in the importance of fishing in the late Norse economy, as proposed by James Barratt and others, lead to the abandonment of more marginal agricultural settlements, making these late norse, rather than early Viking, farms?

Alternatively, some of these upland sites may represent not abandoned farms, but sheilings contemporary with settlements on better land which have disappeared under later farms.

View the Viking Unst project phases

Sponsors: Heritage Lottery Fund, European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)/European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund (EAGGF), Shetland Development Trust, Shetland Enterprise Company, Shetland Amenity Trust, Historic Scotland, Shetland Islands Council, University of Bradford.