The Orkneys

Our final stop, before sailing to London and flying out to home, was Kirkwall. It is in the Orkneys. We were told that the Orkneys do not want to separate from Great Britain but remain. That, of course, is not the common view in Scotland. The National Party just had a vote to leave and enter the EU as a separate country. The vote failed but who knows what will happen next time?

Anyway, ruins here make even the Iron Age farm seem relatively recent. There are standing stones, similar to Stonehenge.

standing stones

Like Stonehenge, they line up to the solar equinox. There are a lot of speculations about the purpose of the stones but no one really knows.

We also saw ruins that date to 3000 BC. (Is the US a young country or what?) Trash was used in the walls to insulate inside. Plus, just like the ruins in Crete, there were indoor toilets. What happened that this little luxury went extinct and had to be reinvented in modern times?

neolithic ruins

 

neo ruins two

It is thought that the sea was further away then; again no one is sure. But the water is coming in now and threatening the excavation. The people who lived here ate fish and other things from the sea. No one is sure what happened to these people although there is another settlement nearby and one of the theories is that they moved.

The land upon which these ruins were found has belonged to the same family for generations. Incredible.

It was very cold and windy. We did not hit warm weather until we reached London. And, as with the other places we visited, there were a lot of sheep.

 

 

orkney library two

For all my fellow librarians, here is the Orkney Library. I was told this is the oldest Carnegie in the world. Something that amazed me. I thought all the Carnegies were in the U. S. The Orkney Library looks like it has been added to several times.

orkney library

Next time: some random thoughts.

Norway 2

One of my favorite parts of this trips was seeing an Iron Age farm. Man, times were hard. The people lived in longhouses with sod roofs.

Peopel lived in the south, animals in the north, so the heat from the animals came down, Also the smells and other less nice things. I’ve read about the custom of keeping the animals in the house. Diseases that began in animals then jumped to humans.

But I digress.

I was very interested in the loom. The weaving was done top to bottom. The warp threads at the bottom were hung with weights. Weaving, which for me is a fairly quiet operation, must have been noisy.

loom weights

One of the things I found interesting was the green tape and the interpreter’s green shirt. I knew from my research for “Death of a Dyer” that there was no green dye in Europe. In Peru they used some plant but that had not been discovered in Europe. But they did have yellow, blue (indigo) and red (madder).

yarns

So, where did they get green? Here is a better shot of the green tape.

green tape

I asked the interpreter and he referred me to the Archaelogy Department. Answer: they over dyed, beginning with yellow and then blue.

For pictures of the dress and shoes I refer you to the blog by ArchaeoFox.