Note sull'episodio
In the winter of 1850 a storm stripped the grass from a hillside above the Bay of Skaill in Scotland and exposed stone houses with beds, shelves, and hearths. Skara Brae, occupied from about 3180 to 2500 BC, predates the Egyptian pyramids and is considered Europe's most complete Neolithic village. The laird William Graham Watt dug out four houses before giving up in 1868, looters struck over a weekend in 1913, and after a 1924 storm washed part of a house into the sea, V. Gordon Childe led a professional excavation in 1927. In 2019 a note on the back of a photo revealed that four women long taken for tourists, Margaret Simpson, Margaret Mitchell, Mary Kennedy, and Margaret Cole, were Childe's students working the dig.
Seven nearly identical houses sat packed in midden, compacted household waste that blocked Orkney's wind and gave off slight heat. Storage boxes always sat left of the door, forcing visitors to turn right, and the right-hand bed was always larger, while beads and paint pots turned up in the smaller left beds. The Grooved Ware people kept cattle, sheep, and pigs, grew barley, sealed limpet tanks with clay, and burned dried seaweed for fuel. House 8, with no beds and two meter walls, served as a workshop. Evan Hadingham called the site the Pompeii of the North, pointing to a broken necklace in a passage, while Anna Ritchie argues for slow abandonment as the climate turned colder and wetter. Today rising seas and storms threaten the site itself.
- The glassy, slag-like residue called cramp left behind by burning seaweed at high temperature
- Thirty liter jars holding traces of oat and barley ale laced with deadly nightshade, hemlock, and henbane
- The Skara Brae Buddo, a 5,000 year old whalebone figure with eyes, a mouth, and a belly button
- The first recorded evidence of the human flea in Europe
- Carved stone balls and long ivory pins linking the village to the Boyne Valley in Ireland