My summer job? grave robbing vikings

Hello there Charlie!

I think I have now officially entered the very restricted circle of alumni that are still writing on this blog 2 years after they left. By that, understand that I have a severe case of Stockholm syndrome and oh god please send help.

If I'm here today, it's to give you a little insight into what I have been doing with my life since I left. After I got my bac, I flew off to the University of Edinburgh where I'm currently doing a mixed degree in Archaeology and Ancient History. And one of the requirements at the end of my 1st year was to do a 3 weeks fieldwork. After looking for sometimes, I decided to join an excavation by the University of Bradford in Orkney.

That's where I was, on the Isle of Rousay!

For those of you who might not know, the Orkney Isles are the little islands north of Scotland. Picture yourself the rampant alcoholism of Scotland, with the cold of Scandinavia, and the emptiness of La Creuse, and that's basically it... Nah that's a little harsh. It is a very secluded place indeed, but this is a solitude like no other, you don't get to enjoy a place of absolute calm and quietness like this one a lot (although I would have loved some phone reception from time to time). On Rousay, the island I was staying on, there were only 200 inhabitants and the only public buildings there were a pub/liquor store/small hostel, a small grocery shop and a school that was used by the surroundings islands as a kindergarten and middle school. It is a very peculiar place indeed, there are no cops or ambulances, the doors don't have locks, everyone literally knows each other... I'm not sure I would like to live there 24/7 but it sure was an interesting experience, it's like a completely different society.

Anyway, after a short flight from Edinburgh to Kirkwall (the main city on the mainland), I took a bus and a ferry, and off I was to the hostel where I will be staying. I was not alone tho, and it was a very international excavation! There I met people who are now dear friends who came all the way from New York, Iceland, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Israel, Australia... it truly was a fabulous time with them! We might have been 6 people per room, but my god was it a blast to be around them so much!

The last survivors of the excavation

And thank god they were nice, cause I never thought that my first excavation would be so hard! I will spare you the scientific lingo, but basically here was our site, the Knowe of Swandro:

Not gonna lie, this is a pretty amazing picture

This is where I spent 3 weeks, it's a multi period site that spans from the Bronze Age all the way up to the Vikings. As you can see, it is on a coast, which means that thanks to good ol' climate change, the seas are rising and this good boi is gonna get swallowed up by the waves by the next 10 years, so we have to excavate it ASAP (and mind you, this thing has been worked on for the last decade, every summer, for 7 weeks). The excavation was intense, we had 8h of work per day whatever the weather was like (ie. we were swimming in mud most of the time). But despite all that, I can't stress enough how absolutely fascinating this thing is as an archaeologist, but hopefully by the time we excavated everything we'll be able to create a compelling narrative for the public! What we are sure of so far, is that it used to be a Bronze Age burial (that's the massive circle you can see) that was later reoccupied by Iron Age and Pict population who built houses and smithy on top of it. Those later populations then had a not so friendly discussion with Northerners about who should own this place, and were rapidly forced out. We managed to know that by the number of butchered bones that were worked in a typical Viking fashion, alongside comb in whale bones (yes) and a general collapsing pattern of the Pict structures on top of those artefacts.

And now that I put to sleep at least 90% of you with Archaeological nonsense, let me give you a fun fact about the site (well as long as you are not the idiot doing it). Because of the harsh winter storms in Orkney, we had to find a way to protect the site. With a ditch? Naaaaaaah that's too easy. Let's just put inside 26 BLOODY TONES OF STONES. What's that? using motorized engines for this time consuming and exhausting endeavour? ahah sweet summer child, let's just make the students move them by hand in 5 days.
Yeah in all fairness the last days were super intense, I'm grateful that I only had to do the backfilling part and not the "taking all the stones and cutting all the grass" part of the first days. But the joyful bunch I was with made it so much more bearable. And you know, it was not all just moving stones, there was also some actual excavation.

You can't see it on the picture, but I'm being harassed by midges, those things can best be described as Satan's mosquitoes: small, uncatchable and they sting real bad.

I learned so much there, and I'm so so so glad I had such amazing tutors. They were all goofy but brilliant academics... really, I couldn't dream of anything better. From how to use drones to create fully rendered 3d model of a site, to scanning, to processing the finds... I feel like I learned more in 3 weeks than I did over a full year.

So yeah, that was my summer. Digging up Viking bones and pottery pieces on a foggy island North of Scotland that is closer to the Arctic circle than to London. And you know what? I loved every second of it. The food was good and so was the beer, both the locals and the students were adorable, I learned a bunch of stuff while being supervised by the most awesome of tutors... What else could I ask for?

That's all for me, see you maybe next year Charlie if I haven't died during my second year!

Kellian