Sea Change: Orkney and Northern Europe in the Later Iron Age AD 300-800
Edited by Jane Downes and Anna Ritchie

A new book on the Iron Age in Orkney and northern Europe was officially launched in Kirkwall last Thursday night.

Sea Change – Orkney and Northern Europe in the Later Iron Age is a compilation of the papers presented at the conference of the same name.

And given the intensity of the four-day conference, and the quantity of information delivered to the 200 or so delegates, this book is a veritable godsend.

For four days in September 2001, I filled two notebooks of hastily scribed notes. Sitting through the Sea Change Iron Age conference in Kirkwall I was sure these would be adequate reminders of the seminar.

But I was wrong. Today, those notes, although readable, remain on the whole incomprehensible.

So imagine my delight to learn that the Orkney Heritage Society was publishing a book of all the papers presented at the four-day conference. At last, the chance to recall the details of the lectures – without first having to trawl through pages of hieroglyphic shorthand. The notebooks are now, fortunately, binned.

The 25 papers are separated into four sections – Ritual and Burial, Settlement and Artefacts, Language and Society and Archaeology: The Minehowe Know How event.

Within these categories, however, the content of Sea Change is such that to try and summarise it in a few hundred words would not do the publication justice. Instead I will outline a few of the papers that appealed to me and leave the interested reader to source the book themselves to delve deeper.

Anna Ritchie begins by exploring paganism among the Picts and their subsequent conversion to Christianity. She outlines the historical and archaeological evidence for Pictish paganism and of particular interest is her piece on Pictish shrines – perhaps explaining one of the stranger features of Minehowe uncovered in 2000. This excavation is further detailed in a paper by Nick Card and Jane Downes.

Patrick Ashmore’s Orkney Burials in the first Millennium AD summarises the changing trends in burial practice in the county, from the inhumations discovered at Howe in Stromness to early Viking Orkney and Sanday’s Scar boat burial. This is followed by a comprehensive list of (discovered) Orcadian burials over the period.

Moving into the second section “Settlements and Artefacts”, after papers on settlement continuity in Northern Scotland and Steve Dockrill’s “Broch, Wheelhouse, and cell: redefining the Iron Age in Shetland”, the reader is returned to Birsay’s Buckquoy excavations in a joint paper by Anne Brundle, Daphne Home Lorimer and Anna Ritchie.

Here, the Buckquoy evidence uncovered in the early 1970s is reappraised in the light of subsequent discoveries. The authors conclude that, despite the ongoing debate about their origin, their most probable origin remains Norse – something they admit will allow the debate over the relationship between Orkney’s Picts and the ‘invading’ Vikings to continue.

Further study of the artefacts found at Buckquoy, as well as the ‘figure-of-eight’ house itself, show clear connections with western Scotland and Ireland.

After dealing with the architecture and artefacts, Daphne Home Lorimer concludes the paper with a report on the human remains uncovered during the excavations. A fascinating review of a pivotal excavation – expecially in light of more recent discoveries and theories.

The agricultural “revolution” in Iron Age Orkney is the subject of Julie Bond’s paper.

Focusing on Pool in Sanday, she outlines the perceived changes in animal husbandry and cultivation over the lifetime of the settlement – changes she describes as “innovations and intensification in the agricultural economy of Orkney before the arrival of the Vikings.”

The apparent success of these Iron Age farming settlements may well be, she adds, the reason they may have been early targets for Scandinavian settlers.

Returning to the Picts, Graham Ritchie’s paper “Pictish Art in Orkney” documents the examples of Pictish symbols found in the county over the centuries - from the fragment found at the Sands of Evie and then rediscovered in a Birsay byre, to the well known Brough of Birsay symbol stone, and its easily recognisable warrior procession. Again, a valuable compilation of information.

The first paper in the third section – Language and Society – is a look at the oft-debated subject of the pre-Norse language in Orkney. In it renowned scholar W.F.H. Nicolaisen tackles what has long been a thorny subject.

Although Orkney has no shortage of archaeological evidence for pre-Norse Orkney, the linguistic and toponymic evidence of the pre-Norse Orcadians is practically non-existent (or at the very least very difficult to spot through the accretions of time).

Nicolaisen looks at a selection of the various theories put forward over the years.

All of these have generally depended on the relationship between Picts and Viking – i.e. were the Picts obliterated, hence the lack of indigenous placenames, or did the Vikings simply ignore them.

Although not even attempting to answer this hotly-debated question, Nicolaisen repeats his theory that the Norse settlers did not necessarily start making up new names for the Orkney landscape around them.

Instead, he asks, did they carry familiar names from their homelands which they transplanted onto suitable sites in Orkney and Shetland? As such, the Norse did not “reject” any indigenous names – they simply neglected them.

An interesting idea and something, it could be argued, that continues today, as it has over the centuries since the first Norse name was applied in the islands.

So was the Viking invasion of Orkney a peaceful one? Not according to Shetland archivist Brian Smith, whose paper “Not Welcome at All: Vikings and the Native Population in Orkney and Shetland” is recommended reading for all – whether proponents of the “War” or “Peace” theories. Smith’s opinions on the matter and firmly in the former camp – the Vikings, he says, treated Orkney and Shetland no differently to the other places they “visited”.

What they wanted, they took. In Smith’s opinion there was no peaceful co-existence, no gradual integration. And his arguments, as usual, make lively and interesting reading.

The Iron Age saw a shift from monumental structures as a means of expressing status to individual artefacts – a topic dealt with by Niall Sharples in the closing paper of the third section of Sea Change to a close.

The final section covers Minehowe Know How - the event that took place in May/June 2002 that involved practical workshops, recreations, demonstrations and the like.

The eight papers presented within the final section of the book cover a small part of the event and begins with Jacqui Wood’s study and recreation of the Orkney Hood – a rare piece of Iron Age clothing unearthed in 1867.

Along the same lines, the second chapter deals with the recreation of the Knowes of Trotty grave goods while Andrew Appleby considers the pottery styles found at Minehowe.

As mentioned previously, space precludes anything other than a light stratching at the surface of Sea Change.

But by its very subject matter, it is a volume that can be dipped into again and again. Suffice to say this is a book that should be on the shelf of anyone interested in the history of Orkney.

Some might say that the Iron Age has long lain in the shadow of the Neolithic period – particularly in Orkney. But this publication shows this is no longer the case.

Published on behalf of Orkney Heritage Society by the Pinkfoot Press, Sea Change – Orkney and Northern Europe in the Later Iron Age is edited by Jane Downes and Anna Ritchie and available from local bookshops, priced £18.50.

ST