Question 1: What do we know about the source(s) of the stones at the Ring of Brodgar and what does this tell us about the community who constructed and used the site? (4:17)
We know, we’ve looked at the stones forming the Ring of Brodgar and what we’ve found is that there seems to be different types of sandstone employed for the different monoliths there. Survey and so on has found three places where the stones were derived: one at Vestra Fiold, on the west coast of mainland Orkney; one at Staney Hill, which is on the north side of the Loch of Harray; the last one, the quarry is no longer there but we know that the stones were brought from there because that’s the only place where you have Eday flagstone on the mainland, assuming they didn’t come from Eday. Those three sources account for three out of seven different types of sandstone, so there’s another four reaming that we’ve not located. These are all coming from different parts of mainland Orkney and the significance that that holds is, well there’s numerous points – the first is that because Orcadian settlement is sedentary, people are living in one place all the time, they’re building their houses out of stone, they’re building their chambered tombs out of stone, and some of the chambered tombs have what are called ‘stalling’ in them, which is huge orthostats. So they’re actually quarrying standing stones from the mid-fourth millennium BC. Because of that I would suggest there was an attachment between them, their constructions, their labour and the land; and that’s intertwined with their social identity. So, by quarrying stones form their locality and taking them to the Ring of Brodgar, I would suggest that that’s a form of competition, where labour itself, the ability to do it, the resources which are needed to do it, including large feasts and so on – that’s not available to everybody.
Who’s doing it? Well in Orkney you seen to have village groups, and the interesting thing about the village groups is that they’re too small to be self-sustaining, so they’re exogamous, marrying outside. I suspect these aren’t kin-based, and you see their sort of identity, expression of identity in the settlements in the pottery: different decoration, different styles of decoration, in different villages.
So, you’ve got is a situation which akin to Levi Strauss’s idea of house societies where you have people living together, not strangers, but intertwined with their kin and the way they construct their identity is in proximity and this is why Levi Strauss called them house societies.
So, highly competitive society, very unstable, and fluid; and everything disguises that because it looks like it’s a very sort of stable permanent settled community but it’s not, it’s unstable and very fluid.
So why then are they creating one large circle out of these things? Well, the anthropologist Victor Turner had this idea of Communitas, that is in ritual context everyone becomes equal. I don’t think that that’s necessarily exactly what’s happening but it could be that there’s almost an image of containment of equality, of perhaps coming from single origins, looking at descent patterns and so on. It’s almost like you’re seeing, in the Ring of Brodgar, a microcosm of these different communities all together. So, even though they are all individually discrete, even though they’re highly competitive, there’s clearly an image of some sort of unity I suppose which marks a huge contrast with what you see in the Hebrides, for example at Calanais, where you see discrete stone circles, not unified, in different locations, built with stone form the very place they stood on. So, very similar monuments; but very different mechanisms behind them.
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