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Boy with the Bronze Axe - Episode 23
136 Plays6 years ago
The Boy with the Bronze Axe by Kathleen Fidler is set in the Neolithic Orkney settlement of Skara Brae. Though written for children this book is also really interesting for adults thinking about how interpretations of Skara have changed over the years. Kim talks to Orkney resident and specialist Caroline Wickham-Jones about the archaeology behind the book when it was written in 1968 and how it could be updated for the 21st century.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Pre-Histories' Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to Pre-Histories with me, your host Kim Bedelf.
Fiction and Archaeology: Beyond Evidence
00:00:20
Speaker
On this podcast we do two things. We use fiction books as an excuse to talk about the archaeology behind them. But also explore what fiction can do that pure archaeology can't.
00:00:33
Speaker
Archaeology relies on evidence, and necessarily any picture you paint relying solely on evidence, especially of the remote past, will be incomplete. So a bit of imagination can take us to places where we can paint more detailed, many layered picture. Authors are adept at world building, so maybe they can teach us archaeologists
Connecting with Prehistoric Fiction Writers
00:00:54
Speaker
something.
00:00:54
Speaker
Now, regular listeners will know how Eurocentric the books have been on here, but I have good news. I've found a whole Facebook group of prehistoric writers, would you believe? And there are loads of really recent books set all around the world. So I'm really looking forward to reading those and finding people to talk to about them.
00:01:14
Speaker
As usual, any recommendations that you have of books that you've read that you want me to read and to feature on the podcast, send them to me on Twitter. My handle is atkimbiddelf. That's B-I-D-D-U-L-P-H. Or leave a comment under the podcast. I'd love to hear from you.
Interview with Caroline Wickham-Jones on 'Boy with a Bronze Axe'
00:01:40
Speaker
For now though we are still UK based and I'm talking to my guest more on her in a minute about Kathleen Fiddler's Boy with a Bronze Axe which is set at Skara Brae on Orkney around around about 2500 BC.
00:01:56
Speaker
My guest today is Caroline Wickham-Jones. Hello. Hello there. Thank you very much for joining me and I see that your suffering from a cold is the same as I am. Yes, I'm afraid so. I hope I'm not going to be coughing my way through this but yeah, it's winter. We get colds. I guess they got colds in the Neolithic too.
00:02:16
Speaker
I guess so. Yes, we'll try dear listeners to mute our coughing if that comes up at some point. I'm here drinking a lem sip as we speak. So Caroline, we have talked before. It was really nice. Thank you for coming back on. Last time we talked about what I think is still, sorry to all the other books that we've talked about, but Margaret Elphinstone's The Gathering Knight is just so beautiful, isn't it?
00:02:44
Speaker
Yes, I mean, well, obviously I'm biased, but there's a lot of good other books out there as well. So it's nice to, you know, have the opportunity to talk about others too.
00:02:55
Speaker
it is yes yeah you helped her with her research didn't you yes yes yes so you can go back and listen to that one it's one of our very early ones i think i can't remember what episode it is maybe three or four or something like that but very very good um but today we're talking about we're going a bit further north because that was mostly set in the western aisles wasn't it so we're up in orkney um you are um a bit of a specialist in this area aren't you
00:03:20
Speaker
Yes well I mean as we speak I'm living in Orkney and I would normally say that I have fabulous views out over sea and islands and all the northern Orkney landscape but actually today it's raining hard and
00:03:36
Speaker
Sadly, the sea is shrouded in a sort of silver mist, but... Oh, it sounds very atmospheric. It is, yes. Luckily I'm indoors. Yeah.
Early Settlements in Orkney and Scotland
00:03:47
Speaker
So, you're a research associate at the University of Aberdeen, but also doing freelance stuff now, aren't you, as an archaeologist?
00:03:56
Speaker
Yes, I spent a few years lecturing for the University of Aberdeen and now I'm doing more of my own work and perhaps working at my own pace to different priorities.
00:04:14
Speaker
I suppose I miss the students but I don't miss university bureaucracy but I've really got the best of all worlds because I've been able to keep my research association with the university and so I'm involved with them in various research projects, yes. That's really good. Are you involved in anything specifically you can tell us about at the moment?
00:04:37
Speaker
Well, with them nothing in Orkney, so we're working on actually some really quite exciting sites to the west of Aberdeen along the River Dee where we've got evidence for much earlier settlement in Scotland going back perhaps even 13,000, 14,000
00:04:57
Speaker
years ago and we're just waiting to hear on a grant application. So it's interesting because when I moved up to Orkney about 15 years ago I thought I wouldn't be tempted away from Orkney again because Orkney is such a wonderful place to live and work.
00:05:14
Speaker
But the Mesolithic and Paleolithic archaeology of the River Dee has managed to get me to leave my Northern Ireland home just occasionally. But most of the work that I do is involved up here in Orkney, where I'm involved in a multi-institutional research project looking at the past landscape, really, and the way that it's changed since people first came to live in Orkney.
00:05:42
Speaker
So there's stuff on the River Dee then, it's later up a Paleolithic. And you always think of Scotland being completely covered in an ice sheet, don't you? And nobody getting there until the end of the Ice Age. So that's amazing stuff, really. What does that mean about the settlement of Orkney? I mean, when does that happen?
00:06:00
Speaker
Well it's really interesting actually and we're really changing the whole way that we look at the earliest settlement of Scotland. Perhaps the first thing that I would say is that of course just because there's an ice sheet doesn't mean that people are not living there and I think when I studied archaeology we all had this idea that
00:06:21
Speaker
an ice sheet was a totally no-go area but if you think about it we know people around the world or not around the world but obviously in cold places who lived very successfully in conjunction with ice so you know just because there's ice doesn't mean there's nobody there but of course the other problem that comes is that where there is ice the evidence will often be more difficult to find because if you're
00:06:47
Speaker
archaeological sites are being laid down on ice or in areas that are being affected by ice, then they are not necessarily going to look like sort of sites that we get elsewhere.
New Insights into Orkney's Ancient Human Activity
00:06:59
Speaker
But the other thing really with Scotland is that our whole view is perhaps changed by appreciation of the existence of Doggerland, which is the fact that
00:07:09
Speaker
The British Isles were once part of the continent. They were joined on to the continental landmass by this massive area of land, which we nowadays would call dogland, and which is totally underwater. So if you think about Orkney, right towards the very end of the last ice age, 15,000, 14,000 years ago,
00:07:32
Speaker
You would still have had to cross a channel of water to get to Orkney and Orkney is indeed islands but there is a greater, much greater landmass to the south and east of Orkney which is where
00:07:47
Speaker
the main body of the bridge shafts, if you like, is still at that time attached to the continental landmass. And we haven't really worked out the details of this. We do, excitingly, have a very few artefacts in Orkney, really just two or three, that are
00:08:08
Speaker
spear points of a type that suggests that there were hunting groups at least crossing Orkney if not living here for long periods. We really know very very little about that. I think you have to look at these, I was going to call them the great reindeer hunters
00:08:29
Speaker
of the Paleolithic and these are the same sort of people that we're seeing penetrating into mainland Scotland. The main difference perhaps with mainland Scotland is that it's quite a mountainous area and Orkney isn't. So when they go into mainland Scotland they're having to perhaps adapt their lives, adapt their way of living their perhaps exploratory groups
00:08:52
Speaker
when they go into Orkney they're still exploring but they're finding a landscape that they will be more familiar with whether they're following herds whether they're just looking to see what's over the horizon we don't really know but we do have evidence that people are getting up here right from this early period although of course our main
00:09:14
Speaker
settlement, main human activity in Orkney doesn't start till about 9,000 years ago with the arrival of the hunter-gatherers who are coming along the coast at the end of the last Ice Age and moving into areas that really hadn't been available for long-term settlement prior to that.
00:09:37
Speaker
That's so cool that it goes so far back. As you say, people could be travelling across the ice really easily. I mean, there's the stuff from Creswell Crags, which has got what appear to be horse hunters going and staying. And that's in Nottinghamshire, which I always thought was quite far north, you know. But I'm living down in Buckinghamshire at the moment, so that's why.
00:10:01
Speaker
Yes, I think our whole idea of this very early period and the earliest settlement of the UK, it's changing and it's going to change dramatically over the next 10 years. It's really a very exciting period to be interested in archaeology and all I would really say is, you know, watch this space, follow the developments because I think there's a lot of new material going to be found.
00:10:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's fantastic. It's why I love prehistory. There's always something new every week. But in Orkney, I mean, it is very, very well known around the world, isn't it? I mean, there was the recent last year, really a couple of programs about the archaeology of Orkney focusing on the Neolithic, which is what's most famous. And that's what Kathleen Fiddler's book focuses on as well, even though it's called The Boy with the Bronze Axe. It's actually
00:10:53
Speaker
set in the Neolithic, isn't it, when the farmers had built quite permanent settlements? That's right, yes. So it's set in a slightly more recent period amongst the first farmers that came to Orkney. And I would say that there was the BBC programme which
00:11:11
Speaker
as you say came out last year and in fact just after Christmas in early January the Travel Channel had a program which covered, I haven't actually watched it yet, terrible admission, but it covered
00:11:26
Speaker
Certainly they filmed at Scarabray, a series called Expedition Unknown, and they too were looking at the links between the farming peoples of Alkney and things that were going on further south in the British Isles. So I think broadcast in the UK and in the States, but people might like to watch that as well.
00:11:50
Speaker
On the Travel Channel, you say? On the Travel Channel. It's a series called Expedition Unknown. Cool. And it was quite early in the series. It might be called... No, I can't remember what it's called. It's about Stonehenge and Orkney anyway. I will see if I can find a link to it and put it in the show notes under the podcast.
00:12:10
Speaker
I can send you a link, yes. Oh, thank you very much. That's great. Yes, so it is very famous. Now I thought, I mean, obviously, you have written a couple of books on the Neolithic of Orkney. Could you just kind of give us an overview of the basics? I mean, many people might have heard of Skara Brae and seen pictures online. I haven't ever visited, which is terrible, something I've got to do. And yet, I've
00:12:39
Speaker
you know, known about it for over 20 years.
00:12:42
Speaker
So tell us a bit about Skara and the other big sites on Orkney. Yeah, sure.
Orkney's Neolithic Sites and Life Depictions
00:12:51
Speaker
I mean, I think what makes the Neolithic of Orkney really special is that we have wonderful preservation up here for reasons which I'll mention in a minute. People were building a lot of their structures out of stone. But also, I think it's worth noting that
00:13:13
Speaker
If you kind of divide life into three, which is life or settlement, death, and then the bit in between which is ceremony and things, very often when you look in archaeology, we might have two of those three. So you might have houses and you might have tombs, or you might have ceremonial sites and tombs and things. It's very unusual to get all three aspects of life.
00:13:39
Speaker
We've got the houses, we've got the tombs and we've got the ceremonial sites. So we have a very complete picture of life in the Neolithic. We also have on all those sites a fabulous record of everyday objects. The material culture is very well preserved up here because the soils are slightly less acid. And so although people are making a lot of things out of bone and wood and things, they're kind of, you know, clutter, if you like.
00:14:09
Speaker
In other places, that might all dissolve away. That might have long disappeared in the acid soils that we tend to have across much of the UK. But here in Orkney, it has survived. And then, of course, we have the fact that, well, there is an accident of geology means that Orkney stone breaks in a way that provides you with readymade slabs for building. And then although when the farmers first arrived in Orkney, there was woodland
00:14:38
Speaker
here, the wood very quickly disappears, partly because people are opening up the landscape for farming and partly because of environmental change that's going on at the time. So that by the time you get into certainly the second half of the Neolithic, there's really very little timber around for building houses and things. And so people not surprisingly turn to building out of stone. And that means that their structures have survived for us to look at.
00:15:08
Speaker
So we're in a very privileged position because you can go and walk around the remains of houses that were built 5000 years ago. And that's pretty amazing. It is amazing. Yeah, I mean, just seeing that you can kind of go in with online, you know, 360 tours and things like that. And
00:15:29
Speaker
look around all the houses and so on. It's really good fun. There's a number of good websites to look at the sites. I think it's also worth saying that I mentioned the fact that the soils aren't acid and the geology and things. That combination also provided very, very fertile soils and it's really a gentle landscape with kind of easy access to the sea and things.
00:15:53
Speaker
So it meant that the farming communities, when they arrived in Orkney, and we know that the first farmers must have come over here in boats, they were able to pretty quickly to establish farms that were very productive. We know that farming flourished, crops flourished, animals flourished, and of course that meant that the communities
00:16:17
Speaker
They weren't perhaps under some of the stresses that they were elsewhere. Community size seems to have developed. We also see through the Neolithic an increase in complexity, which has fascinated a lot of archaeologists, people like Colin Richards, looking at developments in society, how that's reflected in things like changing styles in houses. We see some of the first village communities arising.
00:16:47
Speaker
things like that. So you're actually seeing quite a sophisticated society arising in a relatively short period of time. Fantastic. Well, we're going to talk a little bit more about the book after the break. So we're just going to take a couple of minutes. You listen to these messages and we'll be right back.
00:17:08
Speaker
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00:17:22
Speaker
Hello, welcome back. Now, we've talked quite generally about Orkney and what a great place it is for archaeologists and it's a little bit of a place of pilgrimage for many of us, a pilgrimage I have yet to make.
00:17:39
Speaker
And the the amazing Neolithic archaeology and why it's so special. Now in this book that we're talking about, it is a children's book, I would guess it's really for age about seven to 10. Yeah.
00:17:54
Speaker
I mean, that's really the age you guess in a way of the children who are the main characters in it. So The Boy with the Bronze Axe by Kathleen Fiddler was written in 1968, so a while ago, which will come up again later. And basically, it's about, it starts with Callie, who is a girl who lives at Skara, and her little brother, Brockham.
00:18:21
Speaker
who is, oh yes, it says Brock and there's six, I can't remember what it says, Kelly is a little bit older and they go searching for limpets while the tide is out but they go a little bit too far and they get surprised by the tide coming in but luckily there is a boy in a boat, a huge hollowed out log boat, the kind of boat they've never seen before who comes and happens to be there and is able to rescue them
00:18:51
Speaker
Now Callie and he, the boy is called Tenko, who I think is a little bit older than Callie as well, speaks a slightly different dialect but they can understand each other and he describes how he has come to be out on the sea coming to Orkney in this weird boat.
00:19:11
Speaker
There was a quarrel between our tribe and another one about the right to hunt in a certain place. There was fierce fighting. My father, the chieftain, was killed before my eyes. Most of my tribe was slain. Cali looked at him in pity. They tried to capture me, but I ran faster than they did and hid in a cave on the shore. At sunset, they gave up looking for me. In the darkness, I managed to reach my father's boat. I launched it and pulled away from the shore. I thought I would land further along the coast, but the wind blew strongly and carried me out to sea.
00:19:42
Speaker
And then Kelly brings, they go back to the shore where Kelly and Brocken's parents are waiting anxiously to see them. And Tenko is worried about whether or not he's going to be accepted at SCARA.
00:19:58
Speaker
especially when, as he stumbles when he's in exhaustion because he's been on the boat for a couple of days and nights, this shiny bronze axe falls out of his tunic and everyone sees it for the first time, sees bronze for the very first time.
00:20:19
Speaker
Yeah, so then it's all about the relationships within Skara and who wants to get the bronze axe off him and how Tenko can fit in and that kind of thing. So there you go, that's a procy. Now, I think the first thing to maybe go into, Caroline, is the chronology of this. Because if you've got, when does Skara get abandoned?
00:20:48
Speaker
Scarabrae is abandoned in the late third millennium BC, so around about 2,200 I think. Sorry, I'll double check the dates. But yes, I mean, it's the village is in use for about five, six hundred years. Yeah. So is it? I was just going to say, I mean, it is interesting because the book
Skara Brae's Abandonment: Fiction vs. Evidence
00:21:18
Speaker
Obviously she's drawing on the wisdom as it was available at the time and so she's looking at a catastrophic abandonment of all the houses together which makes a very nice narrative and story for her book. I think today we would see the villagers being abandoned in a more kind of piecemeal process. Right. But you know that shouldn't detract from the enjoyment of the book if you like.
00:21:48
Speaker
Yes, and I think sometimes, I mean, chronology is one of the things that often gets concertinied in fiction books, isn't it? And it has to, in many ways, to make a good story. But it's good to know that it's not quite as catastrophic as that. So around about 2,200 then, is it possible that bronze had arrived in Orkney?
00:22:13
Speaker
You know, it's really interesting. So we talk about the change to the Bronze Age. In actual fact, there's very little evidence of metal artifacts in the early centuries of what we in our 21st century comfort, what's called the Bronze Age. So it's quite possible that
00:22:38
Speaker
There were odd artefacts that appeared and appeared to be very alien to a local community that would come in and then be taken out in many ways exactly the scenario that she envisages.
00:22:54
Speaker
which would leave no archaeological evidence. I think early on it would be much more copper than actually bronze. There's a couple of, there's a wee copper knife blade and things, but in general people living in Orkney, they wouldn't kind of be aware that things had changed. On the other hand, the scenario that she presents where it is
Prehistoric Economies: Hunters vs. Farmers
00:23:18
Speaker
just one artefact and quite a different artefact, I mean that is probably exactly what happened. So that in general your average way of life just went on exactly the same as it had done in the Neolithic in what we call the Stone Age. But
00:23:37
Speaker
there were around odd artefacts. The interesting thing that I like about the book is that she does talk about very different economies, so she gives us the impression that tankos
00:23:53
Speaker
tribe, I think she calls them, but that this community in mainland Scotland are living mainly by hunting and don't actually do farming. And one of the problems that that's over in the sort of northwest of Scotland, I think one's given that impression, that's where he's come from. And again, although I don't think today we've got any evidence for such kind of black and white that people are either 100% farmers or 100% hunters, nowadays weed
00:24:21
Speaker
tend to see it a little bit more kind of subtle than that, a bit more graded. But it is really interesting that she chooses to write about a period where different communities are living in different ways because of course for us today in the UK we all have the same kind of basic economy.
00:24:44
Speaker
So we've kind of lost that idea of people living in very different ways, not very far away from us. Yes, absolutely. I wonder though if it's part of the concertinering of the chronology again, thinking about
00:24:58
Speaker
how, maybe earlier in the Neolithic, there were communities that did continue to hunt whilst others took on farming. Absolutely, and in fact, well, even in not from, there are red deer bones from Skarabrae, and some fight at Lynx in Northland, which is in Westree, which is essentially a village settlement very similar to Skarabrae. They're definitely hunting red deer, and they're doing very strange things with those red deer. There's a deposit just outside the settlement,
00:25:28
Speaker
they've actually deposited, I think, seven red deer carcasses, which they hadn't taken any meat off. And the suggestion is that it has some kind of ceremonial significance or something. So, yes, I mean, you do have farmers who are hunting. There's certainly red deer around in Orkney, which
00:25:52
Speaker
When she wrote the book, the accepted view was that there weren't red deer in Orkney, and it has been quite a controversial thing, whether or not they were just sort of bringing in dead cuts of meat and things, but now
00:26:08
Speaker
we would generally feel that the word here. But yeah, I mean, the other interesting thing is this idea that it's the hunting community that have access to bronze, because of course, one of the things about the very first metalsmiths is that one tends to think of them as being fairly mobile and traveling around. And that's something that we might conventionally associate more with people who are hunters rather than farmers.
00:26:37
Speaker
So there is an awful lot that you could pick out and explore in the book with an adult audience. I'm not sure that children would find that sort of thing quite as fascinating as I might. Yeah, I know. There are some subtle things in there that you could really pick out how things have changed since 1968 in terms of the evidence that we have and the interpretation that we have. Interpretations, I should say, definitely plural.
00:27:08
Speaker
But that you can't really, it's too nuanced maybe for children. Whereas we talked about this before, don't we? I think some schools I've seen using Ugg by Raymond Briggs and I do mention it several times on the podcast because I hate it. It's a horrible book for teaching the Stone Age. But I've had teachers say to me, yes, but I can use it to teach them about their preconceptions and what is clearly wrong. But
00:27:36
Speaker
there's not everybody uses that word that way. Not all teachers I've come across do actually use it that way. But I have had a couple of people say that, because it's really, really obvious, you know, quite a lot of understanding on the teacher's part.
00:27:51
Speaker
I think it's interesting with the Boy with the Bronze Axe, I mean the one thing that really stood out for me, well two things, she gives a very good description I think of the physicality of the settlement and
00:28:07
Speaker
You know, perhaps what it's like to be inside these small, this small space, these stone structures with other people, that sort of thing. I mean, I tend to find when I go into the, there's a reconstructed house at the site, when you go and go with students or when you look at the archaeological houses, people will say, oh, they're very small, you know, how could you possibly live in a space this big? But actually, you can go into the reconstructed house
00:28:33
Speaker
with you know 15 or 20 students and everybody fits in fine you might not spend a lot of time there but there are societies where people live in smaller spaces than we do I mean the space that
Living Spaces in Neolithic Homes
00:28:45
Speaker
we have become accustomed to that's a luxury of the 21st century
00:28:50
Speaker
Oh absolutely, yeah. I think you're right, there's a scene later on in the book where everybody is in one house and I was thinking to myself, really? Could they all fit in? But that's really interesting that you can. I do love that, yes, that she really brings those houses to life, although it doesn't need that much really because you've got the bunks for the beds and you've got the central hearth and you've got a little pond to keep your fish and you've got your dresser and niches and things like that.
00:29:18
Speaker
It's amazing really how, you know, down here in England, we just don't get that kind of detail about the houses. It's really, unless you're very, very lucky. Yeah, absolutely. There are remains of timber houses from the period, elsewhere across the UK, but
00:29:40
Speaker
It's difficult to know whether our interpretations of them, how much they're influenced by what we find at Scarabrae. I mean, they do tend to always talk about them being, oh, this is just like Scarabrae, but it would. And then if you think about Scarabrae, maybe you would interpret it slightly differently.
00:29:58
Speaker
I think one thing if I was writing about the houses today I would try and bring out a little bit more the way in which you have certain ways living certain norms that allow you to live in a space like that so that if you look at groups that live in single spaces like for example Mongolian yurts or
00:30:24
Speaker
you know TP type structures. Very often there are sort of areas that people can go into and areas that people can't. So guests entering might often always go to the right or not pass in front of the fire or sometimes there are certain you know like the older people might sleep or always on one side of the fire and you often do
00:30:46
Speaker
have this dresser straight across from the entrance, which is the first thing that you see. We call it a dresser because that's what it's always been called at Scarabray, but it has perhaps a bit more significance than that because it is the sort of first impression. There have been suggestions that it might be more of a sort of
00:31:09
Speaker
altar or ceremonial thing. There's lots of different things it could be but you could, I mean, I think to call them rules about living.
00:31:19
Speaker
makes them sound very Dragonian. But even if you think about Our Houses Day, there are ways that we live in our houses that they're not rules, but we all adhere to them. So if you go round to a friend's house, you don't kind of go into her bedroom without asking her. Actually, we tend to even ask before we go to the bathroom in somebody else's house. So we still have spaces
00:31:43
Speaker
that are used in very specific ways and they would have done this at Skara Brae and I think you know one could bring that out in a novel today perhaps that is perhaps a way of using the space that wouldn't have been thought about in the 1960s when the novel was written. Yeah this is true I guess
00:32:07
Speaker
I think it's different in more modern books. Like Margaret Elphiston's book, she does look at more evidence from different groups of people around the world to bring into it and make it richer. But this one is very purely based on, as you say, those 1960s interpretations. One of the things she also mentions are the carved stone balls, which are always so fascinating for a lot of people as well, which
00:32:36
Speaker
sometimes found on the dresser, is that right? It's difficult because when Scarborough was first unearthed it was in the 19th century and there was quite a lot of
00:32:51
Speaker
what should we call it, rearrangement of the site or things going on that weren't perhaps very well recorded. But that certainly is very, very unusual because it's one of the only domestic sites where calfstone balls are found. When you find calfstone balls that's where Scotland, they tend to be found out in the fields. Now, it may be that there was an eolithic house there and the evidence for that has long gone on. You know, it's been ploughed away so that the calfstone
00:33:20
Speaker
that's left. So that's, the fact that we don't find them in domestic sites doesn't mean that they didn't occur in domestic sites, but we do tend to think of them as a much more uncontested find, whereas at Scarabray and indeed now other sites in Orkney, we do have carved stone balls
00:33:39
Speaker
from sites, the newly found site at Nestor Broca, which of course is a totally different type of site and was totally unknown when Kathleen Fiddler was writing.
00:33:52
Speaker
very relevant, and I'm sure there are novelists writing new novels to incorporate that as we speak, but they've got quite a lot of carved stone balls. Carved stone balls are of course, yeah, you're right, they're a big enigma, they fascinate people, and it's really good to see them written into this novel, so that she's picking up not just on the source, but also on the material culture.
00:34:19
Speaker
pottery too, doesn't she? Yeah, she does lumber the potter, make it, yes, and goes into quite a lot of detail. Can I just read a little bit about her interpretation of the carved stone balls?
00:34:32
Speaker
So this is just before they go to the Ring of Brodger, actually, for a ceremony. Berno, who is Tenko's adopted father at Skara, came to the meeting place carrying six beautifully carved stone balls. These were the symbols of the sun belonging to the tribe of Skara. Some of them had been carved by men of the tribe long since dead, but two of them had been carved by Berno himself.
00:34:56
Speaker
Bonneau looked with pride at the last stone ball he had carved. The carving on it was so deep that the pattern stood out in spikes like a hedgehog. It had taken Bonneau a whole year to carve, sitting by his fire at nights. The spikes represented the rays of the sun. He carried the symbols to the waiting crowd.
00:35:13
Speaker
And so she links it to a sun cult, which of course we sometimes talk about in the late Neolithic, and that they represent little suns. But there are so many different interpretations, aren't there?
00:35:31
Speaker
Yes, but I think if you're writing a novel you've got to come off the fence and promote one, and the idea of a stone continent links it to the big stone circles and things. It's brilliant,
Exploring Archaeological Narratives through Fiction
00:35:44
Speaker
it's great. You know, that's what we use fiction for, to explore the kind of way in which
00:35:52
Speaker
the rather dry and dusty things that we find make sense in human terms. And she's doing that brilliantly with carved stone balls. Yeah, I think so. I think it is a really good idea. I mean, there's lots of theories about them being, I don't know, like balls or weapons or something like that. But yeah, I like this interpretation. It doesn't mean to say it's true, of course. I don't have any problem. I don't really
00:36:21
Speaker
believe any more in an archaeological truth. You know, when I studied, which was more or less back in the Stone Age, we were kind of taught that there was a right way to see the Neolithic and a wrong way. But now, you know, every, if you read
00:36:37
Speaker
10 books on Neolithic Scotland, you will come away with 10 very different ideas about Neolithic Scotland. They will obviously agree on some things, but they will have differing interpretations of other things. And so in some ways, every archaeologist produces their own picture of the past.
00:36:58
Speaker
and you know that's fiction just helps us to enrich that in many ways so we're lucky that there are writers of good fiction like Kathleen Fidler who are interested enough to explore that. Absolutely.
00:37:14
Speaker
Now we're going to take another quick break. When we come back we're going to be maybe a little slightly bit more critical of Kathleen Fiddler but only in the fact that she was writing at a specific time and some of the things that may be updated for the 21st century.
00:37:33
Speaker
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00:37:47
Speaker
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00:38:08
Speaker
Hello and welcome back again. Right, Caroline? So, so far, I mean, I really love the book, actually, I do love the story. And I think it's, it's very much about human relationships and how a stranger can come into a place and be accepted or not, and things like that. But there are issues with the fact that it was it was written so long ago,
00:38:31
Speaker
And what Kathleen Fiddler was actually basing the story on, which is basically the early excavations of Gordon Child really, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's hard to, or you know, it kind of surprises one to remember that when she was writing, none of the recent work had taken place. So although through the 70s,
00:38:56
Speaker
there were excavations that Scarabray led from the National Museums of Scotland and things. None of that had happened when she was writing. So what she had to go on was largely Gordon Child's work. Which is the 30s, is that right? Yes, 20s. 20s and 30s, right. So you particularly wanted to say about how some of the things
00:39:25
Speaker
and I mean obviously we've talked a little bit about how they weren't necessarily just farmers but were hunting as well and the red deer on the island and stuff and that landscape of the island is really important actually to get the feel of the place isn't it? Yes and I mean she brings out very very well
00:39:43
Speaker
the island landscape and she talks about this fact that the children have never seen a big tree and in fact quite a lot is made in the novel of the lack of wood and their unfamiliarity with wood I think gets the impression that they're not even using wood for
00:40:01
Speaker
hafts and handles and so both at a kind of small scale i.e. in the existence of wood or not and at a broader landscape scale I think that's really where for me
00:40:17
Speaker
the novel comes over as most dated because and maybe it just shows our sort of preoccupations today but we're much more concerned with the environment and as archaeologists we're much more aware how the environment around Skara Brae has changed dramatically so in fact she writes about the villagers being right by the sea and on
Impact of Environmental Changes on Skara Brae
00:40:42
Speaker
the
00:40:42
Speaker
copy I have which I'm not sure it's a classic Kelpie the picture on the front shows the village right by the sea as it is today when in actual fact we know that certainly when the village is built it's some distance from the sea and the sea has slowly eroded back
00:41:03
Speaker
And by the time the sea gets to being in close proximity to the site, probably very few of the houses are still in occupation because one impact of the sea eroding pack was that they get much more sort of salt spray and sand and things blowing onto their fields. So that interestingly, in the latter years of the settlement, so in the period which she's writing, there's very little evidence, for example,
00:41:32
Speaker
that the inhabitants were able to cultivate grain. Farming seems to have more or less stopped. And there's a new publication going to come out maybe this year, maybe next year, I'm not sure when, but that does look at this. And this seems to be one of the main reasons for abandonment, that life at Scarabray just gets increasingly difficult as it roads back towards the site.
00:41:58
Speaker
um and this is one of the the sort of biggest changes perhaps so that for the children the interesting thing about the boats the log boats i think although they wouldn't have known any trees of that stature in orkney they certainly would have been familiar with driftwood with large logs washing
00:42:19
Speaker
And that's something that she doesn't take into account at all. But again, it just reflects the changing nature of archaeology. We have so many specialists today. You have people doing PhDs on driftwood and its impact on prehistoric communities and things, which didn't happen at all in the 60s.
00:42:37
Speaker
So you're writing a novel today, you're deluged with information in a way that she wouldn't have had available. But I think the idea that they just wouldn't have known would is something that now we wouldn't tend to agree with. But there is a lot that one would agree with. I mean, one of the things that I particularly like is something
00:43:05
Speaker
where she was almost going against accepted wisdom. So for a long time, people thought that Scarabre was isolated and special, but she doesn't promote that view. And she talks about other communities and other people living in different places around Orkney.
00:43:24
Speaker
And in many ways, she's very prescient in that because at the time when it was written, I don't think we were quite so aware of just how many Neolithic settlement sites there were around Orkney.
00:43:36
Speaker
Yes, I mean, although when they do go to the Ring of Brodka to do their lovely sun ceremony, she doesn't talk about the nest, does she? Which of course, as you say, she wouldn't have known about at all. I don't know if it's occupied at the same time. Yes, would have been up and running at that point. So yes, I mean, one would, you know, nowadays have to build in a sort of fairly complicated scenario.
00:44:06
Speaker
to incorporate Ness into the narrative, which of course is something that archaeologists are trying to do. And I do know of at least a couple of novelists who are working on ideas to incorporate Ness into works of fiction.
00:44:24
Speaker
Cool, do they come to you for all their ideas then? Some people will, yes, I mean it is something, so quite often people come to Orkney and they're very inspired by the archaeology and they go away and want to research a novel and they will sort of
00:44:40
Speaker
Then email people in Orkney, many of whom are quite busy, but luckily because I'm in a position of semi-retirement and because I've worked with other authors, it is something that I really enjoy doing and have now worked with several
00:44:58
Speaker
different people who are looking at different aspects, not just of Neolithic life, of other life as well, but in order to produce novels and works of fiction. Usually what I'm doing is just kind of trying to suggest reading for them or answer questions, that sort of thing.
00:45:14
Speaker
And you mentioned a book to me whilst we were chatting before recording. Silver Skin, yes. Yeah, Silver Skin by Joan Lennon. Yeah. Which is very, very recent, isn't it? Maybe last year. It was actually a couple of years ago now. But I mean, in some ways it's it's written for a slightly older audience. I think it's what we call young adult fiction. I'm not sure what that age group is. And I didn't have anything, you know, I didn't
00:45:44
Speaker
talk to Joan or anything but I do really enjoy the novel and in many ways it's looking at Skara Bray in a more, yeah I mean she's taken modern research and built it into a picture of life in the Neolithic. In some ways it
00:46:04
Speaker
covers similar themes to Kathleen Fiddler's book, The Boy with the Bronze Axe, because it is looking at the arrival of somebody different into the community, how they view the community and how the community relates to them. But I would certainly recommend it as a good read. Yeah.
00:46:23
Speaker
Yeah, I will put a link to that on yeah, in the show notes. And I think I'm gonna have to get hold of it. But it's, it's more it's a it's one of those ones where there's a time traveling person going into the past, which I don't know why I have this. I don't know if I like them as much as ones that are purely set in the past. Because when you some people don't like that the book
00:46:47
Speaker
for that reason. I would say he's an accidental time traveller. So in some ways like Tenko in The Boy with the Bronze Axe, he is a teenager who's, as I remember it, living in the future, doing his homework and sort of researching some history project and accidentally goes back further in time than he intends to.
00:47:11
Speaker
So he's not a kind of, shall we say, professional time traveller. And his observations are still made with an element of innocence and indeed anxiety in the same way that tankos are in the boy with the bronze axe. But equally, yes, I mean, it is a device. The device of the time traveller is one that irritates a lot of people.
00:47:35
Speaker
Well, I don't know. I'll give it a go. It does sound very interesting. I just wonder, it's a little bit like that TV show 10,000 BC, where they say, can modern people live in the wilderness and feed themselves? And the question, the answer is no, because nobody, they don't put anybody in there who has any skills. And it's, I think with Tenko, in The Boy with the Bronze Axe, at least he has
00:47:59
Speaker
I mean, he doesn't know how to make bronze, sadly, but at least he has lots of skills like hunting and things that he can bring to the community as well. And I think it's quite good to give that person a little bit of agency so that they're not a victim of like, like a time traveler basically is. I mean, it's not totally alien to him in the way that silver skin
00:48:25
Speaker
It's totally alien. And it almost makes the Neolithic, when it's written like that, it makes the Neolithic seem more weird as well, doesn't it? Because it's this person's reaction to this really weird time. Yeah, that's very true, yes. And I mean, that's one of the things I tried to get over a lot of the time. I just wonder, I know this sounds a bit, this will be a bit rude, especially to say it to you, but
00:48:54
Speaker
A place like Orkney, a little bit like Chateau Hayek, is it overstudied? Is it overwritten about?
Orkney's Archaeological Appeal
00:49:03
Speaker
If there are a couple of novels coming out soon, then we know of a few already.
00:49:09
Speaker
Maybe some research could be focused somewhere else. Novels focus somewhere else. It's a very good question and of course one that lots of archaeologists living elsewhere in Scotland would argue that enough of it has gone to researching Orkney and we should be looking
00:49:29
Speaker
elsewhere. It's a very also a very difficult question because if the data is genuinely there then we want to kind of make the most of it and of course the archaeology in Orkney is threatened just like archaeology is elsewhere so you know we have a duty to kind of
00:49:51
Speaker
do write by it if you like. Equally yes, I mean I've made a list for a paper I'm writing of all the novels set around Scarabray and there's a lot, you know, there's about eight which is really surprising. Could we have that list for the book? Yes, you could do that. Thank you. I would say
00:50:15
Speaker
some are better than others, can I charitably say, so please don't take it as a must-read reading list. But it's just interesting how much Skara Brae, as you say, like Shufflehooke has inspired people to, you know, to produce
00:50:34
Speaker
novels and indeed how it inspires archaeologists to go on working because I mean Orkney certainly in Scotland must have the highest number of archaeologists sort of for the area outside of the main cities and many of them are making a living as I do from you know living and working largely on
00:50:55
Speaker
Orkney archaeology and indeed archaeology is one of the big tourist attractions in Orkney, it's why many people come here. But of course that is because it is spectacular, you know there's something about going to Scarabray that you're not going to get just looking over a muddy field where an archaeologist will say these are postholes and there was once a site here
00:51:21
Speaker
Although you can now get over that with things like digital reconstruction and things, but there is still something about seeing physical remains that attracts us all. And whether we like it or not, Orkney has some, you know. Yes, he really does. I mean,
00:51:39
Speaker
I completely understand the fascination. And as you say, it's one of those places, what you said at the beginning is where it's got everything. It's got the domestic and it's got ceremonial and it's got a few real remains. So you see quite a lot of the life of people who live there, which is just, it is very unusual because down south here, we don't get a lot of the domestic at all.
00:52:10
Speaker
And we have the people, I mean there's a lot of skeletal material from all of it. I mean not every tomb has skeletons surviving within it because some tombs were robbed out long ago and in some places material has just, you know, gone. But a lot of them do have
00:52:30
Speaker
skeletons and things and of course that then is a great source of study looking at isotopes for diet and looking at disease and now DNA and things like that. There seem to be you know in fact if anything more and more projects. There's the recent redating project that Alistair Whittle and Alison Sheridan and people have been involved with
00:52:53
Speaker
looking not just at Orkney but at dates for the Neelik and of course Orkney is one of the best places to get dates for the Neelik. Absolutely. Going back to the book just to finish off, one of the other things that's really nice that she describes are how people on Orkney are not isolated just even just on the island of the Orkney
00:53:21
Speaker
archipelago, but also have those far reaching links to maybe the Shetlands and the
00:53:30
Speaker
and the mainland as well. And from the DNA and from the stabilisotope analysis that's happening a lot more recently, there's quite a lot of things coming up about how linked everybody is and how mobile, not kind of everyday mobility, but
00:53:51
Speaker
They traveled quite a lot throughout prehistory. So that's quite nice. And I wonder whether, although she does make those relationships, she says that they're quite new to people on Orkney. But do you think that they were always well aware of what was going on elsewhere?
00:54:11
Speaker
Well, of course, the recent research does suggest that Orkney is certainly linked in to what's going on in mainland Britain and probably extending links as far south as the Wessex area and Stonehenge. So that's, you know, very interesting and in a way kind of goes against our preconceptions of the Neolithic as perhaps slightly more insular communities.
00:54:35
Speaker
It's interesting that there is actually, in the Neolithic, very, very little evidence for contact with Shetland. There's very little evidence in Shetland that they had access to Orkney or indeed the up south. And there's very little Shetland material in Orkney, very little.
00:54:53
Speaker
but that does seem to change once you get more into the Bronze Age and my sort of hunch is that once you get into the Bronze Age people are needing raw materials that come from the continent and so
00:55:11
Speaker
in England in the kind of Stonehenge area then they're tending to look east and west for sources of metals and things and so this north-south connection tends to diminish and it does seem to be at that point that people in Orkney who are maybe finding that the sort of those further south are less interested in Orkadian connections or maybe they're just expanding anyway we you know I mean who knows but they do then we start to get
00:55:41
Speaker
goods imported from Shetland, we start to see Steertight and things coming down that must be being brought down from the north. So in some ways, the end of her book where they're sort of saying, oh, we believe there are islands further north and
00:55:57
Speaker
maybe we should go and explore those, you know, that is, you know, actually not perhaps dissimilar to our thoughts of today that people's horizons were beginning to change and things. Yes, that's really interesting. I love it when when authors are prescient in that way, whether they, you know, they intended it to be or not.
00:56:18
Speaker
Yes, exactly. I mean, I think one thing, her boat technology is quite primitive. And I think now we would see in the Neolithic as them having access to more sophisticated boats. I mean, certainly by the Bronze Age, there are very sophisticated boats that have been excavated in England. We haven't gotten any Neolithic boats in Orkney, but there are
00:56:42
Speaker
rock art sites for example in Scandinavia that show quite sophisticated neolithic boats so while I'm pretty certain that the journey to Shetland in a log boat would be almost impossible. Even two log boats linked together as a catamaran? Yes I don't know many two log boats linked together which she does bring in actually doesn't she yes but I think they would have had access
00:57:09
Speaker
Possibly. I mean, even the BBC made a sort of very primitive boat and sailed it across the Penn and Firth. But even that, I thought, you know, we do have suggestions that marine technology, maritime technology was a bit more sophisticated than that in this period.
00:57:28
Speaker
And of course they'd also been able to read the waves and all the kind of indications of the sea and things, so also they will know when it's safe to go out and things like that. Yeah, they would know it so much better, wouldn't they?
00:57:46
Speaker
Cool. Well, sadly, we could go on forever, but sadly, it is time to stop. Thank you so much, Caroline, for talking to me about this book. I hope people do go out and get it because it's really, really good fun. But now you do know about how some of the interpretations of alchemy have changed over the years.
00:58:05
Speaker
So I'm going to put on the podcast links to your website, Caroline, and to your books as well. So the big one is Between the Wind and the Water, which is an overview of the Neolithic of Orkney. So I'll definitely put a link to that on the show notes. So thank you so much. Thanks very much. That was brilliant. I enjoyed it. Yeah, me too. Thank you.
00:58:36
Speaker
So thank you for listening, folks. Hope you enjoyed that one. Keep listening to the podcast in the next month. We are going to be talking about
00:58:47
Speaker
the film from the creators of Shaun the Sheep, Early Man. Sick. Now that's S-I-C, not S-I-C-K, obviously. It looks really funny. I haven't seen it yet. I'm going to hopefully see it soon, this weekend. And then I'm hoping to talk to James Dilly, who is himself often an early man, and Erin Kavanagh,
00:59:08
Speaker
to talk about the archaeology behind it, if there is any, and the idea about how we depict people from the Stone Age and the Bronze Age. So it should be, but of course it's all in a great spirit of fun. There's no point in taking it too seriously. So that should be quite a good one. And then after that, I really have got to get the roll right stones people
00:59:34
Speaker
onto the podcast, so hopefully that will be for March. All right then, if you haven't listened to any of ours before, there is a back catalogue of 22 episodes, so do go and listen, or listen to the hundreds of other podcasts available on the Archaeology Podcast Network. Thanks very much.
01:00:00
Speaker
This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective.
01:00:30
Speaker
you