Tiree, Balevullin

NL94 2 BALEVULLIN

NL/94 47

A brief account of this late Bronze or early Iron Age wooden hut is included here because of the importance of the pottery found there . There are no C-14 dates for the site, and of course dating by pottery styles is not infallible.

The site

In April 1912 A H Bishop was walking along the sandy area between two rocky promontories when he saw pottery lying about. Trial excavations were undertaken for three weeks in the summer of the same year and they found clear traces of the post-holes of a wooden hut with a fireplace of baked clay. Although most of the finds in the Hunterian Museum (Bishop gave his large collection of archaeological material to the Hunterian Museum in two donations, the first in 1914 and the second in 1951. Some of the Balevullin material came in 1914 but most of it was received in 1951) are simply labelled “Balevullin”, a few came with more specific labels referring to three different “huts”. A letter to the museum from Bishop in 1952 confirmed that all the pottery came from a “kitchen midden” site on a sandy area between the two rocky promontories referred to, so there is little doubt that it all came from his excavations and collecting activities at the hut site.

Finds

Before commenting on the pottery it is necessary to draw attention to three unusual, small, single-piece bone combs which so far have no parallels in the Atlantic Province of Scotland. They are completely distinct from both the long-handled ‘weaving combs’ of the middle Iron Age and from the composite, iron-riveted combs of the late Iron Age, and they must surely hold an important clue to the age and cultural affiliations of the Balevullin site. Being specific-ally labelled as from “no. 1 hut” they are clearly potentially important. The only exact Scottish parallel that the author is aware of comes from the “Roman” horizon at the Sculptor’s Cave at Covesea in Morayshire (Benton 1931, fig. 9, no. 1). However the associated pottery (below) suggests that the Tiree combs are much earlier, and may date to the early Iron Age (7th/6th centuries BC). If so the fragment from the Covesea Cave may be a stray from the late Bronze Age horizon there.

Apart from two almost complete vessels, most of the Balevullin pottery is difficult to match with the standard Hebridean Iron Age forms, even though it extremely well made and hard-fired. The two pots (nos. 26 and 27) appear to be simple forms of the small cordoned vase – thought to be a sub-style of Vaul ware vases – found sporadically at Dun Mor Vaul from the earliest levels and also at a number of other Hebridean sites, particularly Dun Ardtreck on Skye where several examples are well dated to about the late first or mid 2nd century AD (NG33 2).

These little vases are not chronologically specific but the complete absence of Everted Rim ware surely means that the hut belongs to a time before about the first century BC. Moreover the absence of the standardised Vaul ware vases (though there is at least one decorated Vaul urn) could mean that the site actually dates to a time contemporary with, or even before, the earliest occupation of Dun Mor Vaul. Two other types of pottery appear to support this idea. The first comprises four sherds (nos. 58-61) which look very like early Iron Age, bucket-shaped cordoned urns from Staple Howe in Yorkshire (Brewster 1963). The second – perhaps less convincingly exotic by itself – is another miniature pot which strongly resembles some early Iron Age wares from All Cannings Cross and similar sites in southern England (MacKie 1963, 173: Lane 1987).

There are several small, hard-fired, thin-walled plain vessels (nos. 39-42 and 54 and 57) which do not fit easily into the local middle Iron Age pottery repertoire. They look like small versions of the Orkney/Caithness jar which has turned up on many broch sites in those regions – for example Midhowe (HY33 1) and Crosskirk (ND07 2).

Sources: 1. NMRS site NL 94 NE 6: 2. MacKie 1963. More references are given under [1].

E W MacKie 2007