Brunthill

In connection with the project Northern Worlds, which focused on the introduction of agriculture in Shetland and parts of Scandinavia, a number of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age settlement, burial and ritual sites were visited across Shetland. The work commenced in May 2013 and is ongoing.

One of the sites inspected is Brunt Hill (or Brunthill) in West Mainland (Walls peninsula), which is situated S of the Walls village at the northern end of the promontory of Whites Ness (HU 252 479). This site is a small early prehistoric quarry complex exploiting an outcrop of the local Old Red sandstone of the Walls Formation; it is characterized by a number of pits. The deeper pits towards the W may be recent, and probably delivered sandstone for planticrubs,

pens, dykes and houses, whereas the more shallow ones along the field’s northern perimeter appear to be prehistoric quarry pits, which provided raw material for the production of ard points (prehistoric plough shares), but apparently not other types of artefacts.

It is the authors’ intention to carry out further inspections at the site, and to characterise the quarry complex in greater detail. Investigation of this prehistoric site and its artefacts would provide information relevant to several questions, such as:

1) is the site as specialized as it appears, that is, focusing entirely on the production of ard point rough-outs, or were other tool forms also manufactured at Brunt Hill?;

2) what is the likely date of this site?;

3) is it possible to define production waste diagnostic of ard point manufacture?;

4) is it possible to define the operational schema responsible for the production of the ard point rough-outs;

5) how does this quarry complex compare with the well-known felsite quarry complexes in North Roe?; and

6) how might the Brunt Hill quarry complex fit into a general Neolithic/Early Bronze Age Shetland exchange network, for example disseminating felsite

knife and axehead rough-outs from workshops in North Roe, sandstone ardpoints from workshops in West Mainland, and steatite from workshops in different parts of the island group (Catpund in the S, as well as North Roe, Unst and Fetlar)?

It seems that the distribution of prehistoric quarry complexes throughout Shetland is very much a function of the geology of the island group, with sandstone being sedimentary rock, felsite is igneous rock, and steatite is metamorphic rock. The regional geology may have determined the form of

exchange network characterising early prehistoric Shetland, as a settlement would only have been able to procure the axeheads, knives, ardpoints, and steatite vessels necessary for daily life, if it was ‘hooked up’ to a fairly broad-spectrumed and sophisticated exchange network.

The project was carried out by the Danish National Museum, and three proceedings from the project’s workshops have been made freely available on the Internet, partly on the website of the National Museum (Mahler): http://nordligeverdener.natmus.dk/en/research-initiatives/ descriptions-of-the-projects/shetland-the-border-of-farming-4000-3000-boe/#c35612, and also on Ballin’s Academia page:

https://independent.academia.edu/TorbenBjarkeBallin

Archive: Shetland Museum

Funder: The National Museum of Denmark, Augustinus Foundation and private funding

Torben Bjarke Ballin and DL Mahler – Lithic Research/University of Bradford (TBB) and The National Museum of Denmark (DLM)

(Source: DES, Volume 17)