Orkney, the Surprising Center of Neolithic Britain

Twenty years ago, on an island off the northern tip of Scotland, the owners of a farmhouse decided to plow a small patch of land to plant wildflowers. Their neighbor was looking out of the window while doing the dishes and saw the plow bring up a huge flagstone entangled in its teeth. She was curious, but could not possibly have foreseen just how important the find would turn out to be. This flagstone turned out to be just one small building block of a huge Neolithic structure among over a hundred other monumental buildings, which, over 20 years of excavation and research later, has transformed our understanding of Neolithic northern Europe. We now have a picture of a culture — spanning thousands of miles — that expressed itself in monumental stone buildings. Starting over 6,000 years ago, generations built and rebuilt huge statements in stone, a testament to immense skill and labor as well as huge ambition in intention and design. 

This extraordinary density of ancient buildings is a complex on the Ness of Brodgar, a small strip of land (“ness” means “promontory”) running down the -middle of the biggest island of the Orkney archipelago. The island is confusingly called Mainland; mainland Scotland, just an hour and a half away by ferry, is