Were these remote, wild islands the centre of everything?
Excerpt:
Archaeologists spend eight weeks digging at the Ness of Brodgar each summer; the day I visited was the last of the 2015 season. It looked like a construction yard, one where several large buildings were being built from dry stone. And built extremely well. The walls of one structure was 4m thick; the building corners squared off at sharp 90-degree angles. Each stone, while slightly different, fit perfectly flush with the next. (You can see the excavations yourself with this 3D model).
The difference, of course, was that the site wasn’t being constructed, but excavated. And that this building had taken place some 5,500 years ago – before mortar or plaster, axes or levels, metal or wheels, even hard hats.
And that was exactly the point.
Archaeologists have known for a long time that Neolithic people hardly lived in the kind of caricature world of the Flintstones. Take 5,000-year-old Skara Brae: the village’s houses had insulation between their two-layered stone walls; furniture including built-in stone dressers and stone box beds that would have been made soft and warm with animal skins and plants; and even, in one home, Britain’s earliest toilet.
“They were no different from us. They were just as inventive – and in some ways more inventive,” Card said. “When most people think about the Stone Age, even the New Stone Age, and the advent of farming, they think of it as a very simple lifestyle. But I think Neolithic society was more or less as dynamic and complex as our society today.”
Excerpt:
Archaeologists spend eight weeks digging at the Ness of Brodgar each summer; the day I visited was the last of the 2015 season. It looked like a construction yard, one where several large buildings were being built from dry stone. And built extremely well. The walls of one structure was 4m thick; the building corners squared off at sharp 90-degree angles. Each stone, while slightly different, fit perfectly flush with the next. (You can see the excavations yourself with this 3D model).
The difference, of course, was that the site wasn’t being constructed, but excavated. And that this building had taken place some 5,500 years ago – before mortar or plaster, axes or levels, metal or wheels, even hard hats.
And that was exactly the point.
Archaeologists have known for a long time that Neolithic people hardly lived in the kind of caricature world of the Flintstones. Take 5,000-year-old Skara Brae: the village’s houses had insulation between their two-layered stone walls; furniture including built-in stone dressers and stone box beds that would have been made soft and warm with animal skins and plants; and even, in one home, Britain’s earliest toilet.
“They were no different from us. They were just as inventive – and in some ways more inventive,” Card said. “When most people think about the Stone Age, even the New Stone Age, and the advent of farming, they think of it as a very simple lifestyle. But I think Neolithic society was more or less as dynamic and complex as our society today.”