{"it":{"id":"BRI-007","kind":"site","sub":"British Isles","name":"Maeshowe","place":"United Kingdom","lat":58.997,"lon":-3.188,"date":"It was probably built around 2800 BC.","nfacts":11,"tags":["Britain"],"sum":"Maeshowe, on Orkney, was probably built around 2800 BCE. Around the winter solstice, the setting sun shines down its long passage and lights the back wall of the chamber.","why":"Maeshowe lines up with the midwinter sunset; Norse raiders broke in about 3,000 years later and covered it in runes.","src":[344],"nsrc":2,"yt":"Two cultures, one tomb: what were the Vikings looking for?","rel":["NEW-NEW","BRI-005"],"hook":"A 2800 BCE Orkney tomb that catches the midwinter sunset, and is covered in Norse graffiti."},"S":{"344":["Wikipedia: Maeshowe","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maeshowe"]},"rec":{"id":"BRI-007","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"grass-covered mound that encloses the tomb measures about","a":"diameter","v":"35","u":"m","o":"The grass-covered mound that encloses the tomb measures about 35 m in diameter and rises to a height of 7.3 m.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maeshowe&oldid=1380028887","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1380028887 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0989"},{"f":"in diameter and rises to a height of","a":"height","v":"7.3","u":"m","o":"The grass-covered mound that encloses the tomb measures about 35 m in diameter and rises to a height of 7.3 m.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maeshowe&oldid=1380028887","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1380028887 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0990"},{"f":"located roughly 15 to away and up to","a":"width","v":"14","u":"m","o":"REF6 Around the base of the mound runs a ditch located roughly 15 to away and up to 14 m wide.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maeshowe&oldid=1380028887","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1380028887 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0991"},{"f":"Some of these slabs weigh as much as","a":"mass","v":"30","u":"tons","o":"Some of these slabs weigh as much as 30 tons.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maeshowe&oldid=1380028887","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1380028887 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0992"},{"f":"The entrance passage is about","a":"length","v":"11","u":"m","o":"The entrance passage is about 11 m long and leads to a central chamber that is almost square, measuring about 4.6 m on each side.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maeshowe&oldid=1380028887","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1380028887 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0993"},{"f":"central chamber that is almost square measuring about","a":"base length/width","v":"4.6","u":"m","o":"The entrance passage is about 11 m long and leads to a central chamber that is almost square, measuring about 4.6 m on each side.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maeshowe&oldid=1380028887","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1380028887 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0994"},{"f":"REF9 Today the chamber stands about","a":"height","v":"3.8","u":"m","o":"REF9 Today the chamber stands about 3.8 m high, reflecting the height of the surviving original stonework.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maeshowe&oldid=1380028887","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1380028887 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0995"},{"f":"The passage itself is only around","a":"height","v":"0.91","u":"m","o":"The passage itself is only around 0.91 m high, requiring visitors to stoop or crawl as they move inward before emerging into the taller central chamber.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maeshowe&oldid=1380028887","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1380028887 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0996"},{"f":"the so-called Barnhouse Stone in a field around","a":"distance (not a site dimension)","v":"700","u":"metres","o":"In addition, the so-called \"Barnhouse Stone\" in a field around 700 metres away is perfectly aligned with the entrance to Maeshowe.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maeshowe&oldid=1380028887","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1380028887 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0997"},{"f":"to Egyptian pyramids in that it had a","a":"dimension (unspecified)","v":"54","u":"foot","o":"He suggested the entrance was very similar to Egyptian pyramids in that it had a \"54 foot observation passage aimed like a telescope at a megalithic stone [2772 feet away] to indicate the summer solstice\" (p. 130) in addition to its \"Watchstone\" to the west that indicated the equinoxes.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maeshowe&oldid=1380028887","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1380028887 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0998"},{"f":"aimed like a telescope at a megalithic stone","a":"distance (not a site dimension)","v":"2772","u":"feet","o":"He suggested the entrance was very similar to Egyptian pyramids in that it had a \"54 foot observation passage aimed like a telescope at a megalithic stone [2772 feet away] to indicate the summer solstice\" (p. 130) in addition to its \"Watchstone\" to the west that indicated the equinoxes.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maeshowe&oldid=1380028887","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1380028887 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0999"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"It was probably built around 2800 BC.","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"58.9966","lon":"-3.1882","src":"Wikidata P625 only + curated wave0 value agrees","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"two independent sources agree; max delta 0.0001 deg (~0.01 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/288905594"},"src":[{"id":"S0331","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maeshowe&oldid=1380028887"},{"id":"S0527","t":"Wikipedia: Maeshowe","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maeshowe"},{"id":"VBRI-007-3","t":"Historic Environment Scotland: History and stories | Maeshowe","u":"https://www.historicenvironment.scot/visit-a-place/places/maeshowe-chambered-cairn/history/"},{"id":null,"t":"Mikael Males (University of Oslo), chapter on Jerusalem in Old Norse sources, De Gruyter open access, DOI 10.1515/9783110639438-022.","u":"https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110639438-022/pdf?licenseType=open-access"}],"sum":"In the weeks around the shortest day of the year, the sun hangs low over Orkney. On those days, as it sinks toward the hills, its last light finds a narrow opening in the side of a grassy mound and runs straight down a stone passage into the dark. It lights the back wall of a chamber that has stood for nearly five thousand years. Then the sun goes down and the chamber is black again.\n\nThis is Maeshowe, on the Mainland of Orkney, the island group off the north coast of Scotland. From outside it looks like a smooth green hill, about 35 metres across and 7.3 metres high, rising from a flat plain near the Loch of Harray, with a broad ditch around it. The Norse called it Orkahaugr, the mound of Orkney. Historic Environment Scotland calls it the finest Neolithic building to survive in north-west Europe. The archaeologist Stuart Piggott called it \"a superlative monument that by its originality of execution is lifted out of its class into a unique position.\"\n\nTo get inside you stoop. The entrance passage, about 10 to 11 metres long, is less than a metre high. Each of its side walls is made mostly of a single slab of sandstone weighing up to three tonnes. Then the roof lifts away and you can stand in a chamber about 4.6 metres square, its walls built of great flat flagstones, many running almost the full length of a wall. At each corner rises a massive standing stone. Above about a metre the masonry changes, each course of stone stepping inward over the one below to form a tall beehive vault. Three small side cells open off the chamber, and the floor, back wall and roof of each is a single slab. Some of the slabs in the monument are estimated at as much as 30 tons. Historic Environment Scotland's own assessment calls it \"an expression of genius within a group of people whose other tombs were claustrophobic chambers in smaller mounds.\"\n\nIt was probably built around 2800 BC by a farming people who made Grooved Ware pottery, the culture that rose in Orkney around 3000 BC and spread across Britain and Ireland. Estimates of the labour vary: one common figure is about 39,000 hours, while the archaeologist Colin Renfrew calculated at least 100,000. Either way, it was the work of a large, organised community over a long time, moving huge stones by muscle alone.\n\nAnd it was placed with care. Maeshowe sits at the heart of one of the richest prehistoric landscapes in Britain, rivalled in Britain only by Stonehenge and Avebury. The stone circles of Stenness and Brodgar stand nearby, and the village of Skara Brae lies at the end of an old route through them. A standing stone called the Barnhouse Stone, about 700 metres away, lines up exactly with Maeshowe's entrance, and a building in the nearby Neolithic settlement of Barnhouse faces the mound. Most deliberate of all is the passage. For about three weeks either side of the winter solstice, the setting sun shines straight down it and lights the back of the chamber. The passage was placed to catch that light, and on a midwinter visit it still does.\n\nMaeshowe gives its name to a type of tomb found only in Orkney: a long, low passage to a square chamber with side cells. It closely resembles Newgrange in Ireland, another great passage tomb that catches the midwinter sun. The mainstream reading is that it was a tomb, built to honour the dead and mark the turning of the year at the darkest point of winter, a focus for gatherings tied to the seasons and to the ancestors. After several hundred years it seems to have been closed for good.\n\nBut here is the strange part. A chambered tomb normally holds the dead and their grave goods. At Maeshowe neither has been found in a way that settles its use. It is cited as an example of a passage grave with no evidence of human remains at all. The finest tomb in north-west Europe may never have held the people it was built for, or whatever it held was taken out long ago.\n\nSome three thousand years after it was sealed, people did come looking. In the 12th century Norsemen broke into the mound from above and climbed down into the chamber. Orkney was then under Norwegian rule. Over time, several different hands carved about thirty-three runic inscriptions into its walls, the largest collection from any single place outside Scandinavia. Some are boasts: \"These runes were carved by the man most skilled in runes west of the ocean.\" Some are names. One, carved by a woman named Hlíf, the earl's housekeeper, is a rare woman's voice in runes. One is a compliment: \"Ingigerth is the most beautiful of women.\" And one is a signature: \"The Jerusalem men broke this mound.\"\n\nThose men were probably followers of Earl Rögnvald of Orkney, who gathered a fleet in the winter of 1150 to 1151 and sailed for the Holy Land, returning late in 1153. The scholar Mikael Males suggests they broke into Maeshowe on their way out. The Orkneyinga saga, written about 1200, tells another story: that Earl Harald and his men, caught in a snowstorm, sheltered in the mound. In Norse belief, old burial mounds held treasure guarded by the restless dead. What the raiders found, if anything, is not known. Excavations show that the wall around the ditch was rebuilt in the 9th century, and some archaeologists think the Norse may have reused the mound and that their own goods were the \"treasure\" later visitors took.\n\nIts modern opening was no gentler. In July 1861 James Farrer, an antiquarian and Member of Parliament, broke through the roof of the passage and then the top of the mound, and in a few days emptied a chamber filled with debris. One later archaeologist described his \"rapacious appetite for excavation matched only by his crude techniques, lack of inspiration, and general inability to publish.\" Whatever evidence the fill contained of the tomb's first purpose was largely lost.\n\nSo Maeshowe keeps its central secret. A people of farmers with stone tools raised a vault of thirty-ton slabs and stepped stone, aimed it with precision at the midwinter sunset, linked it by sightlines to standing stones and to their own houses, and may never have laid their dead inside. Three thousand years later, crusaders sheltered in the dark and wrote their names and their love notes on the walls.\n\nEvery December the light still comes down the passage on schedule. If Maeshowe was not, first of all, a house for the dead, then who was it built to receive when the sun came in?","qs":["Two cultures, one tomb: what were the Vikings looking for?","For three weeks either side of the solstice, sunset lights the chamber. Why might a tomb be built to catch the shortest days?","Farrer broke in through the roof in 1861. How much did early diggers cost later archaeologists?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/MaesHoweEntrance.jpg/1280px-MaesHoweEntrance.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MaesHoweEntrance.jpg","title":"MaesHoweEntrance.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Unknown","cap":"","alt":"Maeshowe: Maes Howe Entrance"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/28/Orkney_Cabinet_-_Maeshowe_-_Scottish_Ten_animation_%287883502538%29.jpg/1280px-Orkney_Cabinet_-_Maeshowe_-_Scottish_Ten_animation_%287883502538%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orkney_Cabinet_-_Maeshowe_-_Scottish_Ten_animation_(7883502538).jpg","title":"Orkney Cabinet - Maeshowe - Scottish Ten animation (7883502538).jpg","lic":"CC BY 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0","by":"Scottish Government","cap":"Scottish Government Summer Cabinet in Orkney. People across the globe will now be able to enjoy one of Orkney's most enigmatic Neolithic monuments after Deputy ","alt":"Scottish Government Summer Cabinet in Orkney. People across the globe will now be able to enjoy one of Orkney's most enigmatic Neolithic monuments after Deputy"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"30","u":"t","h":"Some of its slabs weigh this much","s":[92]},{"v":"700","u":"m","h":"Distance to the Barnhouse Stone, aligned with the entrance","s":[92]},{"v":"2800 BC","h":"It was probably built around 2800 BC","s":[92]}],"hs":{"92":["Wikipedia: Maeshowe (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maeshowe"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/BRI-007.webp","w":1280,"h":960,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/MaesHoweEntrance.jpg/1280px-MaesHoweEntrance.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}