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Desk Based Assessment
Date 23 February 1965
Event ID 924895
Category Recording
Type Desk Based Assessment
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/924895
NF75NE 1 7870 5661.
(Area: NF 787 564). An excavation was carried out in 1956 for the Ministry of Works, at a 'site, situated at Bruach Ban on the airfield at Benbecula, (which) proved to be complex, with the remains of at least four structures, of which two were aisled roundhouses, with considerable secondary occupation. The finds consisted of pottery , an upper rotary quern stone and other stone implements, as well as tools of bone and antler: food refuse, chiefly in the form of bones and sea shells, was abundant. The pottery showed that the site was of the stone roundhouse culture, and probably to be assigned to the early centuries of the Christian era' (J G Scott 1956).
The Inventory (RCAHMS 1928) records an earth-house at Bruthach a Tuath (now part of the airfield) but describes a wheelhouse, while Lethbridge (T C Lethbridge 1952 and 1928) illustrates pins of bone, iron and bronze, from the midden of a wheelhouse at the same place, which were donated to the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland (NMAS). (PSAS 1961) He dates the bronze and iron pins to c 3rd century AD. (T C Lethbridge 1928) Other objects (bone, horn, hammer-stone, pottery) "found beside a ruined earth house," in a sand dune at Bruthach a Tuath were donated by Eric Gardner MB, FSA. (PSAS 1930) and J Graham Callander (PSAS 1916). A midden on a second mound, Bruthach Mor, is dated by a buckle to the medieval period (T C Lethbridge 1928)
Information from OS Archaeology Division 23 February 1965
Sources: J G Scott 1956; RCAHMS 1928; T C Lethbridge 1928 and 1952; Proc Soc Antiq Scot 1916, 1930 and 1961.
