The Udal

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The Udal (also Coileagan to Udal or Rubha to Udail called) at Sollas on the Hebrides -Insel North Uist in Scotland is a small peninsula and a multicultural settlement site, which between 1963 and the 1990s was unearthed. Like the Jarlshof on Shetland, “The Udal” hid the remains of a settlement that lasted about 5000 years within a few hundred meters, but in contrast to the Jarlshof, at “The Udal” no attempt was made to preserve the structures.

The Udal is divided into three areas. The earliest is from the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age and was named "RUX" by the excavator Iain Crawford. It lies on today's coastline.

Inland there were two large piles of rubble, Udal North and Udal South. Udal Nord contains the structures of the younger Iron Age , the Picts , the Vikings , the Middle Ages and the Post Middle Ages in 30 horizons and spanning almost two millennia . Excavating these has led to the destruction of the Straten . What remained is like an archaeological quarry.

Between Udal north and south lies an area of ​​deep, closely spaced furrows with deposits of cremated bones on small stone platforms. Here were Wheelhouse found ceramics and two burials. Crawford viewed the area as the cemetery and farmland of the last residents of Udal South, excavation of which began in 1980.

First two wheelhouses were discovered in Udal Süd. A large, partially detached 11-pillar house on the crest of the hill and a smaller 7-pillar building immediately next to it. At the entrance to the larger wheelhouse is a well-preserved rectangular building with three pillars. A basement is located on the west side of the house . In 1987 the third wheelhouse was excavated nearby. This was the same size as the big house, with the same number of pillars and the same spacing between them. Remnants of clay plaster adhered to the interior walls.

All three wheelhouses are oriented to the southeast and have a pillar to the left of the entrance, on the outer wall. Remarkably, none of them have the usual stove. Crawford made an interpretation of these wheelhouses. He says that the central area was in the open air, and that they were not houses but temples associated with some kind of phallic cult . However, the evidence for these hypotheses has not yet been presented, as only details of the excavations have been published so far. The objects found in the houses contained stone tools but little metal. There were some painted ceramics and five painted stones, the first in the Western Isles, although known from elsewhere from the Iron Age .

A Bronze Age forge, from the 6th century BC. BC, stood in front of the wheelhouses at this point, which were built after the forge had fallen into disrepair. Their huts gave a radiocarbon date from the 1st century AD. Thus, the wheelhouses were built sometime in between, at the earliest in the 4th or 5th century BC. Chr.

geology

The Lewisian gneiss of the Outer Hebrides is a very old igneous rock that was formed perhaps 30 kilometers below the earth's crust. It turned into gneiss more than two and a half billion years ago. The Uist gneiss is usually distorted by subsequent metamorphoses and breaks very irregularly. However, the Udal Peninsula area missed the second phase. Due to a freak of nature, the rock breaks into exactly the kind of slabs that are cheap for building materials. The consequence of this can be clearly seen in the construction of the Udal houses.

The 1957 excavated Wheelhouse of Sollas (gäl. Solas) is located in the Middle Quarter on the north coast of North Uist.

literature

  • Beverly Ballin: Research in the machair: 5000 years of settlement at the Udal, North Uist

Web links

Coordinates: 57 ° 40 ′ 57.2 "  N , 7 ° 19 ′ 41.6"  W.