Charity launched to help fund excavations at the Ness of Brodgar

It was announced last week that a new charity to support the Ness of Brodgar excavations in Orkney has been launched in the US. The American Friends of the Ness of Brodgar group aims to promote the archaeological work being carried out at the site and help raise funds for the project.

 
The Ness of Brodgar is a thin strip of land, in the West Mainland of Orkney, separating the Harray and Stenness lochs and excavations on the site have revealed a large complex of ‘monumental’ Neolithic buildings, ‘artwork’, pottery, bones and stone tools. It is seen as one of the most important Neolithic excavations in the world.
 
'Vikings in the Prehistoric Landscape: Studies on Mainland Orkney' by Alison Leonard was published in a 2011 issue of Landscapes and analyses the results of research on the landscapes of Viking-Age and Late-Norse Orkney including the Ness of Brodgar, about which the author says: "Two clusters in particular presented contrasting examples within naturally coherent landscapes of Norse interaction with pre-Norse archaeology: the area around Birsay Bay and that surrounding the Ness of Brodgar".
 
Introduction: Orkney and Viking archaeology
Late eighth-century Orkney was a group of islands rich with physical testaments to millennia of previous inhabitants. Standing stones, stone circles and chambered cairns from Neolithic times sat prominently in landscapes littered with barrows, cairns and mounds from the Bronze Age and later periods. Broch settlements from the Middle Iron Age punctuated the region with crumbling stone fortresses which, after the fourth century, gave way to the symbol stones and ‘figure-of-eight’ dwellings of the Late Iron Age. The latter were still occupied at the turn of the ninth century when Scandinavians, predominantly Norse, came to settle the islands. These hopeful colonists therefore had to contend not only with a native population, but also with a diverse built environment that promoted the endurance of Orkney’s ancient past, to which the Norse had no ancestral claim. This paper explores the concessions made and strategies enacted which enabled the Norse settlers to develop their presence on Orkney such that their legacy remains to this day.

Orkney has been the setting for a great deal of innovative research on the Viking Age (e.g. research on diet; bone combs; steatite; and parish formation), but Norse settlement on the islands has on the whole enjoyed less attention from a landscape perspective, in comparison to other areas of the Viking world. This is changing however, and the number of general landscape studies of Orkney is also steadily growing. Increasingly, too, questions about Norse settlement and identity in Scotland are being addressed through environmental research and other analyses. Orkney is characterised by iconic sites, notably Buckquoy and other sites in Birsay Bay, which for many years have been at the forefront of the debate regarding native-Norse interaction. The data from wellknown sites such as Buckquoy inevitably forms a key component of the following discussions. An effort is made, however, to address such sites within their wider environment, and their interpretation is informed by additional sources including place-names and traditional folklore.

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I've got the sea, I've got the secret: groundbreaking discoveries at the Sea of Galilee

Column capital and column shaft fragments by the side
of the street in modern Migdal

The Sea of Galilee is quite the hot bed of archaeological activity these days - two articles recently published in Tel Aviv and Palestine Exploration Quarterly have caused a bit of a stir in the archaeology and heritage communities.

'Archaeological Evidence For A Previously Unrecognised Roman Town Near The Sea Of Galilee' by Ken Dark suggests the remains of Dalmanoutha have been discovered, the Biblical town on the shores of the Sea of Galilee mentioned in the Gospel of Mark as the destination of Jesus after he fed 4,000 people with a few fish and a few loaves of bread. The article has been picked up by a number of outlets including Sci-news.com, The Independent, NBC News and The Huffington Post.

Professor Dark offered us his reaction to all the attention:

"My recent paper ‘Archaeological Evidence For A Previously Unrecognised Roman Town Near The Sea Of Galilee’ in Palestine Exploration Quarterly was very widely reported in the world media. While these reports generally accurately summarised the archaeological material, the tentative identification of the site with Biblical Dalmanoutha in my paper is over-emphasised in many of them, sometimes giving the impression that the search for Dalmanoutha was the focus of my research. In fact, the site reported in my paper was found in fieldwork undertaken as part of a far wider multi-period project examining the landscape around the Sea of Galilee, rather than as site-centred ‘Biblical Archaeology’.

What I said about the identification of the site was just that, as this seems to be a large, probably urban, settlement on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, it is logical to suppose that it is mentioned in textual sources. Historians working on this region in the Roman period had suggested that there were textually-attested towns called Tarichaea, Gennesaret, Dalmanoutha and Magadan/Magdala on the coast. As Tarichaea seems to have been south of Tiberias (and so far from this site), Magadan/Magdala is usually said to be the site currently being excavated just south of this ‘new’ settlement, and Gennesaret may be a region-name rather than a locality, that leaves Dalmanoutha. However, I stressed in the conclusion to my paper that this wasn’t the only possible identification."



The Sea of Galilee is Israel's largest salt water lake

'Climate and the Late Bronze Collapse: New Evidence from the Southern Levant' by Dafna Langgut, Israel Finkelstein and Thomas Litt has been published in the latest issue of Tel Aviv and presents a study of fossil pollen grains in sediments extracted from the bottom of the Sea of Galilee which reveals evidence of a climate crisis that traumatised the Near East from the middle of the 13th to the late 12th century BCE. It is claimed the crisis brought about the collapse of the great empires of the Bronze Age. The article was the focus of a lengthy piece in the New York Times as well as being picked up by National Geographic and Phys.org.  

"In a short period of time the entire world of the Bronze Age crumbled," explains one of the authors, Prof. Finkelstein. "The Hittite empire, Egypt of the Pharaohs, the Mycenaean culture in Greece, the copper producing kingdom located on the island of Cyprus, the great trade emporium of Ugarit on the Syrian coast and the Canaanite city-states under Egyptian hegemony – all disappeared and only after a while were replaced by the territorial kingdoms of the Iron Age, including Israel and Judah.”

>> Download ‘Archaeological Evidence For A Previously Unrecognised Roman Town Near The Sea Of Galilee’ for free

>> Download 'Climate and the Late Bronze Collapse: New Evidence from the Southern Levant' for free