{"it":{"id":"BRI-009","kind":"site","sub":"British Isles","name":"Ring of Brodgar","place":"United Kingdom","lat":59.001,"lon":-3.23,"date":"It is generally thought to have been erected between 2500 BCE and 2000 BCE, and was,…","mat":"earth;sandstone","nfacts":9,"tags":["Britain"],"sum":"The Ring of Brodgar's builders cut a ditch into solid rock around a great stone circle in Orkney, between about 2500 and 2000 BCE. Its 27 surviving stones once numbered around 60.","why":"What it was for, and how the ditch was dug through rock, are still studied.","src":[382,617],"nsrc":3,"yt":"What were they marking off?","rel":["BRI-008","STO-HEN"],"hook":"Orkney's Ring of Brodgar sits inside a ditch cut into bedrock, 136 m across. Why is still unclear."},"S":{"382":["Wikipedia: Ring of Brodgar","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Brodgar"],"617":["UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Heart of Neolithic Orkney","https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/514"]},"rec":{"id":"BRI-009","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"the island of Mainland in Orkney Scotland about","a":"distance (not a site dimension)","v":"10","u":"km","o":"The Ring of Brodgar stands on a narrow isthmus on the island of Mainland in Orkney, Scotland, about 10 km north-east of the town of Stromness.","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=Ring_of_Brodgar&oldid=1364977158","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1364977158 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1035"},{"f":"Within an area of roughly","a":"area","v":"5","u":"km2","o":"Within an area of roughly 5 km2 surrounding the ring are numerous prehistoric monuments including other stone circles, chambered tombs, standing stones, burial mounds, cairns, and earthworks.","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=Ring_of_Brodgar&oldid=1364977158","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1364977158 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1036"},{"f":"The stone circle is","a":"diameter","v":"104","u":"m","o":"The stone circle is 104 m in diameter, and the third largest in the British Isles.","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=Ring_of_Brodgar&oldid=1364977158","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1364977158 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1037"},{"f":"are set within a circular ditch up to","a":"depth","v":"3","u":"m","o":"The stones are set within a circular ditch up to 3 m deep, 9 m wide and 380 m in circumference that was carved out of the solid sandstone bedrock by the ancient residents.","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=Ring_of_Brodgar&oldid=1364977158","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1364977158 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1038"},{"f":"a circular ditch up to 3 m deep","a":"width","v":"9","u":"m","o":"The stones are set within a circular ditch up to 3 m deep, 9 m wide and 380 m in circumference that was carved out of the solid sandstone bedrock by the ancient residents.","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=Ring_of_Brodgar&oldid=1364977158","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1364977158 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1039"},{"f":"to 3 m deep 9 m wide and","a":"circumference","v":"380","u":"m","o":"The stones are set within a circular ditch up to 3 m deep, 9 m wide and 380 m in circumference that was carved out of the solid sandstone bedrock by the ancient residents.","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=Ring_of_Brodgar&oldid=1364977158","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1364977158 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1040"},{"f":"a large stone wall which may have been","a":"length","v":"100","u":"m","o":"Perhaps the most important find is the remains of a large stone wall which may have been 100 m long and up to 6 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=Ring_of_Brodgar&oldid=1364977158","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1364977158 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1041"},{"f":"have been 100 m long and up to","a":"width","v":"6","u":"m","o":"Perhaps the most important find is the remains of a large stone wall which may have been 100 m long and up to 6 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=Ring_of_Brodgar&oldid=1364977158","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1364977158 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1042"},{"f":"ring in Ireland 125 megalithic yards MY at","a":"dimension (unspecified)","v":"0.8297","u":"m","o":"Burl REF21 notes that the diameter of the bank at Brodgar is almost exactly the same as the inner banks of the Avebury monument in England and the Newgrange ring in Ireland: 125 \"megalithic yards\" (MY), at 0.8297 m per MY.","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=Ring_of_Brodgar&oldid=1364977158","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1364977158 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1043"}],"lab":[{"k":"Materials","mat":"site material (as stated in article)","m":"documentary mention (Wikipedia, auto-extracted)","v":"The stones are set within a circular ditch up to 3 m deep, 9 m wide and 380 m in circumference that was carved out of the solid sandstone bedrock by the ancient residents.","by":"no inline ref in article","b":"S","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ring_of_Brodgar&oldid=1364977158"}],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"It is generally thought to have been erected between 2500 BCE and 2000 BCE, and was, therefore, the last of the great Neolithic monuments built on the Ness.","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":"59.0014818","lon":"-3.2297227","src":"Wikidata P625 only + curated wave0 value agrees","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"two independent sources agree; max delta 0.0002 deg (~0.02 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/268713656"},"src":[{"id":"S0377","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ring_of_Brodgar&oldid=1364977158"},{"id":"S0597","t":"Wikipedia: Ring of Brodgar","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Brodgar"},{"id":"S2618","t":"UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Heart of Neolithic Orkney","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/514"},{"id":"VBRI-009-4","t":"Historic Environment Scotland: History and stories | Ring of Brodgar","u":"https://www.historicenvironment.scot/visit-a-place/places/ring-of-brodgar-stone-circle-and-henge/history/"},{"id":null,"t":"Downes, J., Richards, C. et al., “The Ring of Brodgar,” chapter 4 in Richards (ed.), Building the Great Stone Circles of the North (author version, UHI Research Database PDF).","u":"https://pureadmin.uhi.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/1097748/Great_Stone_Circles_Chapter_4_complete.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"The Ness of Brodgar Project, “The Ring of Brodgar.”","u":"https://www.nessofbrodgar.co.uk/ring-of-brodgar/"},{"id":null,"t":"Archaeology Orkney, “Ring of Brodgar 2008: Postscript.”","u":"https://archaeologyorkney.com/ring-of-brodgar-2008/postscript/"}],"sum":"They were giants, the old story says, and they were dancing. On a ridge between two lochs in Orkney they joined hands in a ring and danced through the night, and they lost track of time. When the sun rose it caught them, and they turned to stone where they stood. The ring they made is still there, tall slabs of sandstone standing in a great circle under an enormous sky, and it is easy to see why people reached for a story like that. The Ring of Brodgar does not look like something ordinary people would make.\n\nIt stands on the Mainland of Orkney, the island group off the north coast of Scotland, on the narrow neck of land that separates the lochs of Harray and Stenness. Historic Environment Scotland calls it one of the largest and finest stone circles in the British Isles and the largest in Scotland. The ring of stones is about 104 metres across, roughly the length of a football pitch, and it is unusually close to a true circle, not the flattened oval of most rings. It once held about 60 stones. Historic Environment Scotland counts 36 surviving, from 2.1 to 4.7 metres tall; after resetting in 1908 and two lightning strikes, 27 stand today.\n\nAround the stones runs a ditch, and the ditch is the real astonishment. It was not dug through soft earth but cut into solid bedrock. Historic Environment Scotland gives its outer diameter as 136 metres; its circumference is around 380 metres. When archaeologists reopened an old trench in 2008, they found the ditch there was 3.5 metres deep and 7.5 metres wide, broad and flat-bottomed, every bit of it carved out of rock. Unusually, there is no surrounding bank, so the rock that came out of it went somewhere else.\n\nBrodgar is the centrepiece of what UNESCO lists as the Heart of Neolithic Orkney, with the Stones of Stenness, the tomb of Maeshowe and the stone village of Skara Brae, among the most important Neolithic sites in Western Europe. These monuments were raised by a farming people who flourished in Orkney between about 3000 and 2000 BC, living in stone houses and burying their dead in great chambered tombs. They placed their monuments in a natural bowl of ridges where each could see the others. Just to the south-east of the Ring lies the Ness of Brodgar, where twenty years of excavation uncovered a complex of monumental stone halls.\n\nWhen was the ring built? Historic Environment Scotland's best guess is between about 2600 and 2400 BC, but it stresses there are no scientific dates for the stones. Dates from the ditch point to the same centuries, though the ditch and the circle need not be the same age. When the trenches were reopened in 2008, as in 1973, no material for radiocarbon dating turned up in the lowest silts, so samples were taken for luminescence dating, which measures when buried sediment last saw daylight. The burial mounds that cluster around the ring likely date from 2500 to 1500 BC.\n\nHow the ditch was dug is now well understood. The diggers worked in sausage-shaped sections and later broke through the ends to join them into one continuous ring. They followed natural angled cracks in the layered rock, shattering each layer with heavy hammer-stones; two broken hammer-stones were found in the lower silts. Antler picks and wedges were almost certainly used to prise the slabs out. Some 4,700 cubic metres of rock and glacial clay were removed, by one estimate at least 80,000 person-hours of work. The archaeologist Colin Renfrew, who first dug here in 1973, took that scale as a sign of centralised political power in the third millennium BC.\n\nThe stones tell a different story about power. Geological study shows they came from at least seven quarries across Orkney. One, on the hill of Vestrafiold above the Bay of Skaill, still holds at least two standing stones that were quarried and then abandoned. In the ring, stones of the same rock type are clustered together. The archaeologist Colin Richards reads this as a sign that different communities raised different sections of the circle, each bringing its own stone. \"My suggestion is that these communities were quite fiercely competitive,\" he has said. In his view, the building was driven by the prestige of quarrying, hauling and raising a fine stone, more than by a finished plan. If so, the ring is less a temple designed by one mind than a monument to rivalry, each group trying to outdo its neighbours.\n\nWhat did people do inside it? Historic Environment Scotland admits there is scant evidence. Archaeologists suggest ceremonies tying the living to their ancestors. One long-standing idea sets the Ring of Brodgar as a place of the dead and the nearby Stones of Stenness as a place of the living. In the late 17th century Martin Martin recorded a tradition that the sun was worshipped in the larger circle and the moon in the lesser, and later antiquarians called the two rings the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Moon, though those names may be romantic inventions. Between them once stood the Odin Stone, where young couples were said to make their vows, until a farmer destroyed it in 1814.\n\nThen come the harder questions. Alexander Thom argued that Britain's Neolithic builders used a common unit of length, which he called the megalithic yard, about 83 centimetres. The archaeologist Aubrey Burl noted that Brodgar's diameter is almost exactly the same as that of the inner banks at Avebury in southern England and the ring at Newgrange in Ireland: 125 megalithic yards. Thom and his son went further, arguing in 1973 that Brodgar and the mounds around it were laid out as sightlines for watching the moon. Most archaeologists are sceptical. One careful re-analysis, by Heggie, found \"little evidence for a highly accurate unit,\" the burial mounds have never been reliably dated, and no one has shown how such a standard could have been shared between communities hundreds of kilometres apart.\n\nThe ditch silted up soon after it was dug, which may mean the monument went out of use, or that the ditch was meant to seal it off. Whether ditch and stones were planned together is still unknown.\n\nHere, then, is a monument at the far edge of Britain whose builders cut a circle from bedrock with stones and antler, raised a near-perfect ring of sixty stones from seven quarries, and may have set it out to the same size as rings in England and Ireland. Were they rivals competing stone by stone, or heirs to a shared knowledge of measure and sky that travelled the length of these islands without leaving a written word behind?","qs":["What were they marking off?","The ring has never been dated scientifically. Should digging it to find out be allowed?","Why would people cut a ditch through bedrock instead of building a bank?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f4/Ring_of_Brodgar%2C_Orkney.jpg/1280px-Ring_of_Brodgar%2C_Orkney.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ring_of_Brodgar,_Orkney.jpg","title":"Ring of Brodgar, Orkney.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Stevekeiretsu","cap":"This is a photo of scheduled monument number","alt":"Ring of Brodgar"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/30/Bren_gun_carriers_of_the_9th_Battalion%2C_Gordon_Highlanders_pass_between_the_prehistoric_standing_stones_of_the_Ring_of_Brodgar_on_Orkney%2C_18_June_1941._H10589.jpg/1280px-thumbnail.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bren_gun_carriers_of_the_9th_Battalion,_Gordon_Highlanders_pass_between_the_prehistoric_standing_stones_of_the_Ring_of_Brodgar_on_Orkney,_18_June_1941._H10589.jpg","title":"Bren gun carriers of the 9th Battalion, Gordon Highlanders pass between the prehistoric standing stones of the Ring of Brodgar on Orkney, 18 June 1941. H10589.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Taylor (Lt), War Office official photographer","cap":"Bren gun carriers of the 9th Battalion, Gordon Highlanders pass between the prehistoric standing stones of the Ring of Brodgar on Orkney, 18 June 1941. Bren gun"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Neolithic_settlement_at_Brodgar_%28geograph_4125928%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Neolithic_settlement_at_Brodgar_(geograph_4125928).jpg","title":"Neolithic settlement at Brodgar (geograph 4125928).jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0","by":"AlastairG","cap":"Neolithic settlement at Brodgar"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e4/Ring_of_Brodgar_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3768252.jpg/1280px-Ring_of_Brodgar_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3768252.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ring_of_Brodgar_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3768252.jpg","title":"Ring of Brodgar - geograph.org.uk - 3768252.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0","by":"David Hawgood","cap":"Ring of Brodgar"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/RingofBrodgar.jpg/1280px-RingofBrodgar.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RingofBrodgar.jpg","title":"RingofBrodgar.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Nachosan","cap":"Neolithic stone ring and henge. Mainland, Orkney, Scotland"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"104","u":"m","h":"Third-largest stone circle in the British Isles","s":[122]},{"v":"60","u":"stones","h":"Originally; only 27 still stood by the end of the 20th century","s":[122]},{"v":"2500 BCE","h":"It is generally thought to have been erected between 2500 BCE and 2000 BCE","s":[122]},{"v":"Earth, sandstone","h":"Made of","s":[122]}],"hs":{"122":["Wikipedia: Ring of Brodgar (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Brodgar"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/BRI-009.webp","w":1280,"h":850,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f4/Ring_of_Brodgar%2C_Orkney.jpg/1280px-Ring_of_Brodgar%2C_Orkney.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}