Beaker people in Britain: migration, mobility and diet

The end of the world, or just ‘goodbye to all that’? Contextualising the red deer heap from Links of Noltland, Westray, within late 3rd-millennium cal BC Orkney

“…These include three dates for three of the deer, plus one date for the cod from the top of the deer heap. These joined the nine radiocarbon determinations, all on unburnt mammal bone, that had been obtained for material from Trench D during the 1980s (Marshall et al 2016: are not yet in the public domain; while analysis of these would help refine the sequence, they do not appear to change substantively the modelled results presented below (Richard Strachan pers comm).) After careful quality assessment of the dated material, and exclusion of five of the 33 publicly available dates for reasons presented elsewhere (Marshall et al 2016: 9-10), chronological modelling was undertaken using (95% probability; last_Trench_D; Illus 11).…”

“…There is a deposit of dark brown sandy clay [11], together with a lensshaped deposit with a dark brown clayey matrix [19] and a concentration of seashells [18] to the west of the wall in the south-west part of the main trench, and to the east of the wall there is a much sandier deposit, clay-like in places Illus 5 Summary of the stratigraphy in Trench D; for details of the radiocarbon dates, see Marshall et al 2016, [13], containing only a few artefacts and bones (other than the heap of deer near its top, as described below; this heap had definitely postdated the wall). On the one hand, it appears that the wall had probably cut through the tail-end of a deposit of domestic waste that had lain at (and at the east end, possibly now beyond) the edge of the pre-existing area of cultivation and refuse accumulation.…”

“…We cannot entirely exclude the possibility that the deer died from natural causes and that their carcasses were subsequently heaped up, but it can be stated with confidence that the placement of the carcasses does not relate to a natural, unaltered accumulation occasioned by a group death (for example, through being caught in a catastrophic sandstorm or a snowdrift: see Rebanks 2015: 190 (Marshall et al 2016), and so only a summary is presented here.…”

“…As detailed elsewhere (Marshall et al 2016), the 'perfect pairs' of dates for the cod on the top of the deer heap and for the three dated deer below it allowed the Marine Reservoir Effect for late 3rd-millennium cal bc Orkney to be calculated, since deposition of the cod can safely be assumed to have taken place at the same time as, or very shortly after, the deposition of the deer. The resulting offset was found to be of the order of three to four centuries (Marshall et al 2016: 12-13, fig 4, table 6).…”

“…A detailed technical report on the dating and Bayesian-modelling work is presented elsewhere (Marshall et al 2016) and forms a companion piece to the current contribution. Here we focus on drawing out the significance of the results, not only as they relate to the broader picture of activities on Links of Noltland but also to other probable examples of structured deposition of deer and other creatures in 3rd-millennium cal bc Orkney.…”