ARCHAEOLOGISTS in Scotland have discovered a 7000-year-old neolithic festival site prior to the construction of new football pitches near a secondary school.
Experts from GUARD Archaeologists discovered the remains of the early Neolithic settlement — which they believed was a focal point for where Scotland’s first farming communities gathered for large festivities — during archaeological excavations at the construction site of Carnoustie High School's new pitches.
"The Carnoustie excavation produced exceptional results, the traces of the largest early Neolithic timber hall ever discovered in Scotland dating from near 4000 BC," said Alan Hunter Blair, who directed the fieldwork.
"This was a permanent structure 35 meters long and 9 meters wide, built of oak with opposed doorways near one end of the building. Its large roof was supported by paired massive timber posts. Its walls were wattle and daub panels supported by posts that were partly protected by its over-hanging roof. And its internal space was sub-divided by more postholes and narrow channels marking partitions."
One of the co-authors of a newly published report on the discovery, Beverley Ballin Smith,, added: "This monumental timber hall, completely alien to the culture and landscape of the preceding Mesolithic era, was erected by one of the very first groups of farmers to colonise Scotland, in a clearing within the remains of natural woodland.
"It was fully formed, architecturally sophisticated, large, complex and required skills of design, planning, execution and carpentry."
What makes Carnoustie unlike other Neolithic halls in Scotland, which were all discrete solitary structures within the virgin farmland of early neolithic Scotland, a smaller companion timber hall existed alongside it.
This was still a substantial structure almost 20m long and more than 8m wide.
The excavation of the smaller hall revealed a large hearth with charred cereal grains and hazel nutshells consistent with a domestic function. The larger hall yielded evidence for the deliberate deposition of stone artefacts, which arachnologists consider are traces of the beliefs and rituals of the community that built and used it.
"The Carnoustie halls, elevated and prominent in the landscape, were probably close to routeways where people may have congregated naturally at various seasons of the year," said Ballin Smith.
"The availability of hazel nuts in autumn is a strong indicator that that season was an important one for meeting, feasting and celebrating. The Carnoustie timber halls may have been a focal point, their significance great enough to attract people from a much wider area.
"We know from the materials found in the Carnoustie buildings that some artefacts came from distant places and represent deliberate deposition, such as fragments of Arran pitchstone, an axe of garnet-albite-schist and a piece of smoky quartz from the Highlands, while other materials were found more locally such as agate, quartz and chalcedony."
After about 200 years, the halls were dismantled and a smaller hall built within the footprint of the larger hall around 3800-3700 BC, but this too continued to receive deliberate deposits of stone tools until about 3600 BC.
The site continued to be revisited with evidence of people camping and gathering outside where the buildings once stood, carrying on the seasonal round of activities until around 2500 BC.
"When Angus Council approved the development of two outdoor football pitches on land at Balmachie Road in Carnoustie, no one imagined the process would reveal one of the most remarkable and internationally significant archaeological discoveries in Scotland," said Kathryn Lindsay, chief executive of Angus Council.
"‘Many current residents in the area may not have imagined life during this period of history, right on their doorstep! The building of two football pitches at this site has provided an inadvertent but invaluable opportunity to learn more about how people in Angus lived in the Neolithic and Bronze Age."
A rare and well-preserved metalwork hoard of a sword within its wooden scabbard, a spearhead with a gold decorative band around its socket and a bronze sunflower-headed swan’s neck pin were also found wrapped in the remains of woollen cloth and sheep-skin.
Hunter Blair explained: "This small hoard had been deliberately buried in a pit within the midst of a late Bronze Age settlement sometime between 1118 - 924 BC."
At around 1400 BC, during the Bronze Age, people had returned to this same site at Carnoustie.
A settlement was established, comprising a single roundhouse, much smaller than the previous Neolithic halls, and replaced three or more times over the following centuries until around 800 BC.
The best preserved of these Bronze Age roundhouses was positioned over part of the foundations of the large Neolithic timber hall. Like the other buildings it had an entrance facing south-east and during the course of its life it was used as a domestic dwelling, a workshop and also a byre.
Near this building, the hoard of precious weapons and jewellery was buried.
Co-author of the report Warren Bailie said: "If any object was a direct import, it would be the sunflower pin. The sword was a viable weapon that from the pattern of notches and rebound marks along its blades had probably seen some use in combat, but there was weakness in the core of the spearhead that would have made it vulnerable in use."
The team discovered that the last occupant of the Carnoustie site was a small field mouse. Investigation of the contents of the spearhead’s socket revealed a considerable amount of fresh-looking grass stems stained by the copper, suggesting that a small rodent (such as a field mouse) had set up house during the fairly recent past in the socket itself.
The archaeological work was funded by Angus Council and was required as a condition of planning consent by Angus Council who are advised on archaeological matters by the Aberdeenshire Council Archaeology Service.
