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Brochs and beyond: excavations at Old Scatness, Shetland

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Stephen J.Dockrill, Julie M.Bond, Val E.Turner, Louise D.Brown, Daniel J.Bashford, Julia E.Cussans & Rebecca A.Nicholson. 2010. Excavations at Old Scatness, Shetland, volume 1: the Pictish village and Viking settlement. Lerwick: Shetland Heritage Publications; 978-0-9557642-5-7 hardback.
Stephen J.Dockrill, Julie M.Bond, Val E.Turner, Louise D.Brown, Daniel J.Bashford, Julia E.Cussans & Rebecca A.Nicholson. 2015. Excavations at Old Scatness, Shetland, volume 2: the broch and Iron Age village. Lerwick: Shetland Heritage Publications; 978-0-99327-40-0-8 hardback.
Nigel D.Melton, Stephen J.Dockrill, Julie M.Bond, Val E.Turner, Louise D.Brown, BrianSmith, Daniel J.Bashford, Julia E.M.Cussans & Rebecca A.Nicholson. 2019. Excavations at Old Scatness, Shetland, volume 3: the post-medieval township. Lerwick: Shetland Heritage Publications; 978-0-9932740-9-1 hardback.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2020

Simon Gilmour  and
Jon Henderson
Simon Gilmour
Affiliation:
Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, C/o National Museums Scotland, UK
Jon Henderson*
Affiliation:
Department of Classics and Archaeology, University of Nottingham, UK
*
*Author for correspondence: ✉ jon.henderson@nottingham.ac.uk
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Extract

Completely unknown until 1975, when it was revealed during the construction of a new road, Old Scatness is a multi-period site that has provided unequivocal evidence dating broch construction to the mid first millennium cal BC, alongside a firmly dated sequence that is crucial to understanding the long Iron Age in Atlantic Scotland. Excavations were carried out at the site between 1995 and 2006 by local volunteers and staff and students from the University of Bradford in a collaborative project led by Bradford and Shetland Amenity Trust. The first volume, The Pictish village and Viking settlement, covering around 1000 years from 400 cal AD–1400 cal AD, appeared in 2010. It was followed by The broch and Iron Age village in 2015, which considered pre-broch occupation from the Neolithic, but focused on the construction of the broch village from the mid first millennium cal BC. The third and final volume, The post-medieval township, published in 2019, examines the settlement evidence from the late fifteenth century AD to the end of the twentieth century AD, placing it within the historic context of the documentary evidence for the period. Given the complexity of the excavations, the range of scientific methods employed and the comprehensive nature of the published volumes, this is an impressive turnaround. As a set, these three volumes represent the full publication of an extraordinary occupation sequence spanning over 2500 years, allowing a detailed reconstruction of the changing social and economic role of a location in Shetland from the development of an enclosed broch, through a period of Norse occupation to a final phase as a nineteenth-century AD croft.

Type
Review Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 94 , Issue 375 , June 2020 , pp. 797 - 801
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2020

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