![]() ![]() With students and archaeologists from her own school and the University of Central Lancashire, Professor Downes has spent the last three summers digging between tides and documenting the artifacts. The next one may erase the Stone Age house. They found an early Neolithic house, older than those at Skara Brae. Walking across Cata Sand on the island of Sanday on a windy December day in 2015, Professor Downes and colleagues noticed an upright stone and red soil that turned out to be hearth scrapings. The new extremes have led to archaeological epiphanies. ![]() They are, she said, significantly faster than at any other point in the last 100 years. “The changes have speeded up,” said Mairi Davies, climate change manager for the agency. Rainfall in Northern Scotland increased nearly 26 percent from 1961 to 2011, according to Historic Environment Scotland, the public steward of Scotland’s historic sites, which has studied risks to Scottish heritage from climate shifts. In addition, Professor Hansom said, more beaches are eroding. Some Orkney beaches have narrowed an average of 16 inches per year since 1970, compared to an annual average loss of eight inches between 18, according to data in Dynamic Coast. “What is of concern is that the extent and pace of erosion since the 1970s has increased.” “Sea level in Orkney has been rising over thousands of years, and so coastal flooding and beach erosion is nothing new,” said Jim Hansom, a professor of geomorphology at the University of Glasgow and principal investigator for Dynamic Coast, a report commissioned by the Scottish government to assess coastal change. But nature’s rhythms are being accelerated by human actions. With tide and time, most beaches will grow and shrink as the sand and sediment subtracted from one spot are added to another. When we did it again a couple of years ago, it was gone.” “We did core sampling at low tide eight years ago, and you could see settlement materials. In early August, as professors and students from Bradford, Highlands and Islands, Orkney College, the City University of New York and elsewhere finished their summer fieldwork, they hoped the sites would be there the following year.Įach tide washes away midden, domestic waste heaps, that provide a “cultural and economic biography,” Professor Bond said. Virtually all the Orkney digs rely on donations to supplement thousands of hours of free labor from students. The Swandro project has a charitable trust to support equipment, tests and housing. “The kick is an important archaeological tool.” ![]() The anvil is among the finds that have emerged since 2010, when Julie Bond, an archaeology professor at Bradford, strolling the beach at Swandro, spotted a stone jutting up. “You can see where the smithy put his hand and his knee,” said Steve Dockrill, a senior lecturer at the University of Bradford. ![]()
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