Buckquoy
The excavations of Anna Ritchie in 1970-71 in Buckquoy , across from the Brough of Birsay on Mainland Orkney in Scotland showed that the long flat hill is covered with remains from the 7th to 10th centuries. The end date is based on a 10th century Viking skeleton that was found in the hill with the destroyed buildings. One of the significant finds is the Buckquoy spindle whorl , which has an Ogham inscription.
description
The male burial contained a grindstone , a bronze ring brooch , half of a silver penny owned by Edmund I, King from 939 to 946, a knife and an iron spearhead . The burial lay in front of the remains of three consecutive, incompletely preserved long houses, each of which was part of a building complex. The youngest was a house with slightly bulging walls, an average of 5.0 m inside width and the remaining length of about 3.6 m. The oldest nave, which was subsequently used as a middle , was a building with a stable at one end, which was 4.0 m wide and almost 8.0 m long. Associated with this were the finds of small bone pins, bone combs, flat spindle whorls , iron knife blades and a game stone . The houses were located above the structure finds were made.
The earliest phase on the site is represented by the fragmentary remains of a one-room building. A grave with a male skeleton was undated. The youngest of the early structures were buildings that had been abandoned before the first longhouse was built. It was an approximately square hall of 4.8 × 4.5 m with a long central fireplace. A round room with an inner diameter of 3.35 m was at one end of the hall and at the other end a room of 3.35 × 2.1 m with an anteroom of 1.7 × 1.2 m between the main hall and the rectangular room. In part, this building overlayed an earlier house with at least three phases, characterized by approximately rectangular fireplaces and the use of panels, both as a wall coating and as internal subdivisions, as found in Brochs. Small finds from this phase are a bone spoon, a double-sided bone comb, bone splinters, a spindle whorl and simple, coarse pottery. Ritchie thought she had found the first Nordic house in Buckquoy and noted with interest that it was full of Pictish artifacts . She had only one explanation for this fact. The use of the native artifacts "implies a close relationship with the indigenous people". In 1983 Ritchie stated again that the native artifacts in the Nordic house proved that the Native Picts were in some form involved in an active social exchange with the Northmen.
Criticism of Ritchie
Iain Crawford pointed out that there were other reasons for the situation Ritchie found. For example, disturbance of the place of discovery or booty from the Nordic arrivals. According to Crawford, the survival of Pict artifacts does not demonstrate peaceful coexistence. In Pool on Sanday, for example, there is nothing that points to relationships between the old and new residents, apart from found local pots. In their book "Vikings in Scotland" James Graham-Campbell and Colleen Batey suggested that Ritchie's house full of Pictish artifacts cannot be a Viking house.
literature
- Anna Ritchie: Excavation of Pictish and Viking-age farmsteads at Buckquoy, Orkney. In: Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. Vol. 108, 1976/1977, ISSN 0081-1564 , pp. 174-227, ( digital version (PDF; 5 MB) ).
- James Graham-Campbell, Colleen E. Batey: Vikings in Scotland Edinburgh Univ. Press 1998 ISBN 0748606416
- David M. Wilson, Stephen Moorhouse: Medieval Britain in 1970. In: Medieval Archeology. Vol. 15, 1971, ISSN 0076-6097 , pp. 124-179, ( digital version (PDF; 2 MB) ).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Katherine Forsyth sees an Old Irish in the inscription and assumes an Irish influence on Orkney. See Katherine Forsyth: The ogham-inscribed spindle whorl from Buckquoy: evidence for the Irish language in pre-Viking Orkney? In: Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. Vol. 125, 1995, ISSN 0081-1564 , pp. 677-696, ( digital version (PDF; 1.7 MB) ).
Web links
Coordinates: 59 ° 8 ′ 3.5 ″ N , 3 ° 19 ′ 25 ″ W.