Skara Brae: a Neolithic village with the furniture still in it

In the winter of 1850 a severe storm stripped turf and sand from a dune at the Bay of Skaill on Orkney's west coast. Under it was a village.

Skara Brae consists of eight surviving stone-built houses connected by covered passages, occupied for roughly six hundred years from about 3180 BC. It predates Stonehenge's sarsens and the Giza pyramids.

Why it survived

Two things: Orkney has almost no timber, so the houses were built of flagstone, including the furniture. And the whole village was buried in windblown sand, which sealed it.

The result is a Neolithic interior that can be walked through. Stone dressers stand against the wall opposite the entrance of each house. Stone bed frames sit either side of a central hearth. There are storage recesses, drains beneath the floors, and what appear to be tanks — possibly for keeping shellfish bait alive.

What was found in them

Tools of bone and stone, pottery of the Grooved Ware type, beads, and carved stone objects with incised geometric decoration whose function is unknown.

Animal bone and shell show a diet of cattle, sheep, fish and shellfish, with barley and wheat cultivated. This was a settled farming community, not a camp.

The drains

Beneath the floors of the houses run stone-lined channels leading away from the settlement.

Some of the small cells built into the walls of individual houses connect to them directly. The most economical reading is a form of indoor sanitation, drained away from the living space.

If that is what they are, they are among the earliest such arrangements known anywhere — in a village of a few dozen people, at the northern edge of Neolithic Europe, five thousand years ago.

The Grooved Ware connection

The pottery style used at Skara Brae, known as Grooved Ware, is now understood to have appeared in Orkney before spreading south through Britain and Ireland, where it is found at Stonehenge and Durrington Walls. The traffic in ideas ran from the far north down, not from the south up — which reverses the assumption that held for most of the twentieth century.

Why it ended

This is where the popular account overreaches. The village is often said to have been abandoned suddenly in a catastrophic storm, with people fleeing and leaving possessions behind.

The evidence does not require that. Abandonment appears to have been gradual, over a period, with houses going out of use at different times. The dramatic single-storm story appears to derive from the circumstances of the site's rediscovery rather than from its excavation.