Orkney forum 49 room
Image by wideford
Orkney

Britain's Ancient Capital: Secrets Of Orkney

close
more_vert
Sanctuary S
Sanctuary Jan 12, 2017 11:33:05
Replying to tiompan

tiompan wrote:
Why would you use animal bone to stabilise paving slabs ?
Is there are precedent for the practice in similar circumstances ?
Why must there always be precedents? Someone has to be first :-)

If you were laying paving on less than perfect soil you could quite easily use whatever was at hand to bolster and level them up. In this case it could have been the larger animal bones. Seems perfectly reasonable to me...and it obviously worked! I think the bone immediately under the slabs and touching them supports (no pun intended) that theory.

T tiompan
tiompan Jan 12, 2017 11:45:28
Replying to Sanctuary

What is less than perfect soil ?

If they were the first to use bone as a stabiliser where are the later examples ?

Bone isn't ideal at all, hence the lack of a precedent , or later examples .

The shape is hardly ideal ,more importantly it's organic , it degrades , as was evident on one of the big bones . The builders knew their materials and would have understood this .
If they needed to do any stabilising there was plenty of ideal material to hand , the same stuff that supported the majority of the other buildings e.g. soil ( with very little organic content to degrade ) , sand and stone .

Like all websites everywhere, we use cookies.