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Orkney

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Mesolithic Orkney Settled?


On Radio Orkney it was announced that a student who had been doing research around the Bay of Firth with no success found a large amount of flints when turning their attention instead to a field by the Loch of Stenness (following up on a tip given to them as a result of Colin Richard's fieldwalking). Mesolithic tools have turned up before in Orkney (e.g. Yesnaby) but in amounts small enough to be explained as people passing through. This site having produced enough for a doctoral thesis is a strong indicator of an actual settlement, probably underwater at the loch margins.

The significance of this is that if some Neolithic ideas started in the Orkneys it would help for there to be a previously settled group of people to have developed them, otherwise you require the first Neolithic settlers to have come up with them almost as soon as they reached here i.e. did the ideas evolve from within a society or arise from contact with a specific environment (a dichotomy something like that leastways).
wideford Posted by wideford
10th May 2005ce
Edited 11th May 2005ce

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