{"it":{"id":"BRI-011","kind":"site","sub":"British Isles","name":"Skara Brae","place":"United Kingdom","lat":59.049,"lon":-3.342,"date":"The site was occupied from roughly 3180 BC to around 2500 BC and is Europe's most…","mat":"clay;earth;sandstone","nfacts":3,"tags":["Britain"],"sum":"At Skara Brae, in Orkney, the stone beds, dressers and hearths of a 5,000-year-old village are still in place, and its houses even had drains.","why":"Skara Brae was lived in for about six hundred years, from around 3180 BC, and no one knows why it was left.","src":[390],"nsrc":2,"yt":"Why would people leave homes this well made?","rel":["BRI-008","BRI-009"],"hook":"A 5,000-year-old Orkney village with its stone beds and dressers still in place."},"S":{"390":["Wikipedia: Skara Brae","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skara_Brae"]},"rec":{"id":"BRI-011","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"instead it is above ground with walls over","a":"thickness","v":"2","u":"m","o":"House 8 is distinctive in other ways as well: it is a stand-alone structure not surrounded by midden; REF19 instead it is above ground with walls over 2 m thick and has a \"porch\" protecting the entrance.","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=Skara_Brae&oldid=1382642482","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1382642482 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1057"},{"f":"site chronology","a":"dating (as stated)","v":"avations indicate that occupation of Skara Brae began about 3180 BC REF29 with occupation continuing for about six hundre","u":"","o":"Radiocarbon results obtained from samples collected during these excavations indicate that occupation of Skara Brae began about 3180 BC REF29 with occupation continuing for about six hundred years.","unc":"","by":"per cited source","yr":"","m":"documentary: auto-extracted sentence","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Skara_Brae&oldid=1382642482","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1382642482 (tertiary)","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"","id":"M1058"},{"f":"small bowls and remarkably ivory pins up to","a":"length","v":"25","u":"cm","o":"Other artefacts excavated on site made of animal, fish, bird, and whalebone, whale and walrus ivory, and orca teeth included awls, needles, knives, beads, adzes, shovels, small bowls and, remarkably, ivory pins up to 25 cm long.","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=Skara_Brae&oldid=1382642482","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1382642482 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1059"}],"lab":[{"k":"Materials","mat":"site material (as stated in article)","m":"documentary mention (Wikipedia, auto-extracted)","v":"REF41 The eponymous Skaill knife was a commonly used tool in Skara Brae; it consists of a large stone flake, with a sharp edge used for cutting, knocked off a sandstone cobble.","by":"no inline ref in article","b":"S","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Skara_Brae&oldid=1382642482"}],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"The site was occupied from roughly 3180 BC to around 2500 BC and is Europe's most complete Neolithic village.","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":"59.0487138","lon":"-3.3417499","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/249805919"},"src":[{"id":"S0387","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Skara_Brae&oldid=1382642482"},{"id":"S0608","t":"Wikipedia: Skara Brae","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skara_Brae"},{"id":"VBRI-011-3","t":"Historic Environment Scotland: History and stories | Skara Brae","u":"https://www.historicenvironment.scot/visit-a-place/places/skara-brae/history/"},{"id":null,"t":"Historic Environment Scotland, Skara Brae Statement of Significance (PDF, 2023).","u":"https://app-hes-pubs-prod-neu-01.azurewebsites.net/api/file/703982e8-be07-4f7a-9265-b11e0121c461"},{"id":null,"t":"UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Heart of Neolithic Orkney” (list entry 514).","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/514/"}],"sum":"Step through the low doorway of almost any house at Skara Brae and the first thing you see is a dresser. It is built of flat stone slabs, and archaeologists think it was for display, a place to set out the household's most special things. Nearby are two beds, boxes made of stone slabs. In the middle of the floor is the hearth. Five thousand years after the last fire went out, the furniture is still exactly where its makers left it.\n\nSkara Brae is a Stone Age village on the southern edge of the Bay of Skaill, on the west coast of the Mainland of Orkney, the island group off the north coast of Scotland. Historic Environment Scotland, which cares for it, says nowhere else in Western Europe shows so richly how people of that age actually lived. Since 1999 it has been part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site, alongside the great tomb of Maeshowe and the stone circles of Stenness and Brodgar.\n\nEach house is a single room of about 40 square metres, roughly the floor of a modest modern flat, built of flat stone slabs and sunk into great mounds of midden, the village's own accumulated rubbish. Covered passages link the houses. Set into the floors are small sealed tanks, possibly for soaking fish bait. Each house has between one and four small corbelled cells built into its thick walls, and beneath the later buildings runs a network of drains and cisterns, some opening directly below those cells. That has led to the suggestion that the cells were indoor latrines with running waste disposal, five thousand years ago. One larger building has a special hearth and no beds and may have been a workshop.\n\nThe village was probably built some way inland, perhaps around 500 metres from the sea, on a ridge beside a freshwater loch. The sea has since eaten the coast back until the houses stand at the edge of the beach.\n\nHow old is it? Radiocarbon dates from excavations in 1972 and 1973 put the beginning around 3180 BC, with village life continuing for some six hundred years. Historic Environment Scotland's detailed study refines that picture. The earliest activity dates to between about 3360 and 3160 BC. The oldest houses still standing were built around 2920 to 2885 BC. After perhaps as little as fifty years, two generations, the village seems to have been abandoned, probably because blown sand covered it. It was later reoccupied and stayed in use until around 2545 to 2440 BC, roughly 2500 BC in round figures.\n\nThe story of its finding has become a legend in itself. In 1850, the usual account goes, a fierce winter storm tore the turf and sand from a high dune on the Bay of Skaill and laid bare the stone walls beneath. The local laird, William Graham Watt of Skaill House, dug out four houses before work stopped in 1868. The Orkney historian Ernest Marwick later argued that the storm story was a fiction, pointing to a 1769 description of square chambers in the dunes of Skaill, though others think that account more likely describes nearby Bronze Age graves.\n\nAt first the village was thought to be Pictish, from the Iron Age. Its true age emerged only when Stuart Piggott recognised its distinctive Grooved Ware pottery, which by 1954 he knew to be Neolithic. The site came into state care in 1924 and a sea wall was built to protect it. From 1927 the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe excavated it and opened it to the public. David Clarke and Anna Ritchie dug again in the 1970s.\n\nWhat they found was the stuff of daily life, and something more. There were tools, pottery and gaming dice. There were necklaces, beads, pendants and pins, some of them up to 25 centimetres long, and richly carved stone objects that may have had a ritual use. Rare survivals include a wooden handle, pots made of whalebone, pigments, puffball fungi used to stop bleeding, and rope twisted from crowberry stems. Under the wall behind a bed in House 7, two women lay buried in a stone-lined grave. Nobody knows whether anyone else was buried beneath other walls, because no one has checked.\n\nWho were these people? Historic Environment Scotland's visitor page paints a peaceful village of farmers, hunters and fishers. No weapons have been found, and the site is not easy to defend. Its more detailed Statement of Significance offers a sharper picture. It points to chunky beads and pendants of whalebone and sperm whale ivory, large dress pins and carved stones often read as symbols of power, and suggests the villagers may have belonged to an important family line in an unequal society. The archaeologist Euan MacKie once went further and proposed that Skara Brae housed a priestly elite, an idea others say has no evidence behind it. Historic Environment Scotland also reports, clearly marked as speculation, that some Orcadians may have travelled to the great passage tombs of Ireland's Boyne Valley, and that people from across Britain and Ireland may have come to Orkney for midwinter ceremonies. It links that traffic to the speed with which Grooved Ware pottery spread south, as far as the country around Stonehenge.\n\nAnd then there is the ending. Nobody knows why village life stopped around 2500 BC. The popular story tells of a great sandstorm that drove the villagers out in a panic, so fast that they dropped their necklaces as they fled. Anna Ritchie calls that a myth: the burial in sand was gradual, she argues, and it came after the village was already empty. As village life faded, new monuments were rising across mainland Orkney: Maeshowe, the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness. Perhaps the people moved toward them. Perhaps their world simply changed.\n\nThe older houses still lie buried beneath the later ones, so even the drains are poorly understood. What remains is a place where you can stand in a Stone Age home and see where people slept, where they cooked and where they set out the things they valued most for visitors to admire. Why would people walk away from homes this well made, and what did they take with them from those stone shelves when they went?","qs":["Why would people leave homes this well made?","No weapons have been found at Skara Brae. What can the absence of something tell us about a community?","The storm story is popular but disputed. Why do sudden endings make better stories than slow ones?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/22/2018_07_12_Schottland_%2894%29.jpg/1280px-2018_07_12_Schottland_%2894%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2018_07_12_Schottland_(94).jpg","title":"2018 07 12 Schottland (94).jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Bewahrerderwerte","cap":"Skara Brae"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Mousa_Broch_20080821_02.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mousa_Broch_20080821_02.jpg","title":"Mousa Broch 20080821 02.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/","by":"Otter","cap":"Mousa Broch, Shetland, Scotland - entrance"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d2/Skara_Brae_house_1_5.jpg/1280px-Skara_Brae_house_1_5.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Skara_Brae_house_1_5.jpg","title":"Skara Brae house 1 5.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/","by":"Wknight94","cap":"House 1 of Skara Brae."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Skara_Brae_house_7.jpg/1280px-Skara_Brae_house_7.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Skara_Brae_house_7.jpg","title":"Skara Brae house 7.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/","by":"Wknight94","cap":"Covered house 7 of Skara Brae."}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"3500 BC","h":"Thought to be the oldest standing building in northern Europe","s":[130]},{"v":"3180 BC","h":"Occupation began, lasting about 600 years","s":[130]},{"v":"Clay","h":"Made of: Clay, earth, sandstone","s":[130]}],"hs":{"130":["Wikipedia: Skara Brae (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skara_Brae"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/BRI-011.webp","w":1280,"h":960,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/22/2018_07_12_Schottland_%2894%29.jpg/1280px-2018_07_12_Schottland_%2894%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}