10 - On Ancient Farms: A Survey of Neolithic Potentially Domestic Locations in Lowland Scotland

Summary

Preamble

The headline on the BBC website in November 20101 was clear and unequivocal: ‘Ancient farm found at site of new Forth Crossing.’ Yet the brief story contained far less information than one would like to back up its central claim:

Archaeologists believe they may have unearthed the remains of a Neolithic farm on the site where the new Forth road bridge is to be built. Trial trenches have been dug in a field on the outskirts of South Queensferry on land reserved for the planned Forth Replacement Crossing. Archaeologists plan further excavations to confirm what they believe is an early version of a croft or small farm.

There are a few assumptions packaged up in this journalistic interpretation of a press statement: that it is possible to find and identify a ‘Neolithic farm’; and that it represented a crofting level of economy. The search for Neolithic houses, farms, settlements, villages (whichever terms you wish to use) in Scotland has for over a century been dogged by such assumptions: that such basic units of life should take on a form recognisable to us from our own experiences today. After all, what else would we expect of the first farmers, but that they lived in farmhouses and farmed?

In fact, the excavations that followed the evaluation reported on by the BBC, at a site called Echline Fields, City of Edinburgh, revealed not a Neolithic farm, but rather a Mesolithic settlement site (of considerable significance in itself), although evidence for Neolithic activity was noted. This evidence does not accord with the ‘Neolithic farm’ expectations of the media and public imagination, but does go some way to illustrate the more typical remains of the everyday activities and materials that we would expect to find left behind by the early farmers of mainland, lowland Scotland. The only features dated to the Neolithic period at Echline Fields were three isolated pits, one of which produced sherds from an Impressed Ware pot and a hazel nutshell (dated to the final centuries of the fourth millennium cal. bc), and the other two contained sherds of Grooved Ware (Robertson et al. 2013: 83). The latter features were identified by the excavators as being indicative of ‘domestic deposition’ with associated structures perhaps lost; curiously the third pit was regarded as being ritual in nature containing meaningful, structured deposits (ibid.: 132–3).