British archaeologists have never had it so good. The Orkney Ness of Brodgar site is changing perceptions of neolithic man. More than 600 miles south, a bronze-age find is being hailed as ‘Britain’s Pompeii’. But funds are tight

The story started, one anointed day in March 2003, with a curious stone slab on a finger of Orkney hemmed in by seas. Nick Card, of the University of Highlands and Islands Archaeology Institute, remembers that it was a typically cold and wet day. He was accompanied by his departmental colleague, Professor Jane Downes, and Julie Gibson, the county archaeologist. What they encountered that day has changed their lives and changed Orkney. Ness of Brodgar was a sacred place that defined the passage of time.

What lay beneath their feet, as they discovered bit by bit over the next 12 years, was the world’s greatest neolithic find in the modern era: a complex settlement of buildings and structures made 4,500 years ago which is turning on its head our understanding and perception of this era and its people.

The Council for British Archaeology has designated the last two weeks in July as Britain’s Festival of Archaeology, with hundreds of digs and visits being arranged all over Britain. The organisers couldn’t have picked a better time for their festival. Some 650 miles south of Orkney, at Whittlesey in Cambridgeshire, archaeologists are still in the first stages of wonder at an extraordinary bronze age site that they have begun to describe as “Britain’s Pompeii”.

This younger sister of Ness of Brodgar belongs to a different age but, just like its older Orcadian sibling, it is revealing artefacts and treasures that are changing dramatically our understanding of that period. It seems that Britain is experiencing a golden age of archaeology fuelled by pioneering programmes such as Time Team and the adventures of Neil Oliver in programmes such as Coast and Vikings.

The picture of a 3,000-year-old late bronze age socketed axe with its haft still attached engenders the same degree of thrill as the domino-sized stone figure found at Ness, the earliest depiction of a human face found in Britain.

Ness of Brodgar is a thin strip of green, barely wider than a football pitch, that has focused the gaze of the world’s archaeology community on this verdant archipelago, which keeps a watch on Scotland off its northern coastline.

Today dawns sunny and still and the site thrums with the ceaseless activity of a large team of archaeologists, students and volunteers. A rudimentary public viewing platform has been erected and, for a moment, you wonder if any of these diggers ever thought that their obsession would become a spectator sport.

Card, who is now director of the Ness of Brodgar site, has not lost the sense of wonder and awe that first propelled them all to this place. He has the scorched and windswept visage that characterises those who must meet the elements when they go to work. He pauses only to light up his roll-up cigarettes. So what’s with the viewing platform?

We had always tended to depict our neolithic ancestors as stone-age hippies who frolicked around large stones Nick Card, Ness site director

“We want to share everything we have found here. This is not for keeping to ourselves in our academic ivory towers. And it’s not just about the finds themselves; it’s about the process and the respect for what happened here.”

Card says that an initial feeling of “profound surprise” at what was beginning to turn up gave way to “something approaching awe”.

Gibson sums it up: “The difference between this and what we had before is like comparing Texas with the Isle of Wight.” What happened here remains a source of speculation. In time, though, there is hope that, as this settlement continues to reveal more of itself, increased understanding will follow. The stone slab found on that cold day in March 2003 sparked further geological probing. This showed that beneath the soil there were numerous anomalies indicating human intervention.

Amid the 21 structures made of fine-grained sandstone, a repository of art, pottery and other artefacts has been uncovered. The materials to construct this place were carried here over several miles from various parts of the islands, suggesting that these rooms and chambers were a dynamic meeting place where people came for trade and ceremonials.

Card says: “I think we had always tended to depict our neolithic ancestors as stone-age hippies who frolicked around large stones in some herb-induced fugue. But this settlement depicts a dynamic, skilled and creative people whose workmanship would bear scrutiny with 21st-century methods.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Archaeologists digging at the Ness of Brodgar on Orkney. Photograph: Alamy

“There was also competition. This might have been a peaceful, farming community but there are suggestions here of a local hierarchy, perhaps social climbing.

“There is aspiration here, as though neighbourhoods vied with each other in skills and artistry.”

In the middle of the biggest structure, a long thin stone stands apart from all the rest. It is an austere slab, and gaunt, but with an aura. “It was placed in the ground on a straight north to south line,” says Card, “and to the east and west it meets the gaze of other neolithic structures on these islands.” You are transfixed by it and what it represented, and what it might represent still.

The Heart of Neolithic Orkney was officially recognised as a Unesco world heritage site in 1999 and includes Skara Brae, the Ring of Brodgar and the ethereal Maeshowe, an ancient burial chamber that is illuminated by the rays of the sun on the winter solstice.

In the midst of our conversation a student presents what seems at first to my untutored eye to be a lump of soil. Soon, though, it materialises into something more precious.

Roy Towers, an archaeological ceramicist at the University of the Highlands and Islands, steps forward and in an instant he has lifted the veil.

“It’s a bit of grooved ware pottery, probably from a cooking pot, from about between 2700-2800BC. This site has given us around 40,000 fragments such as this, but every one of them is a treasure.

“Grooved ware pottery such as this is to be found in every county of England, but it was present here in Orkney 400 to 500 years before anywhere else. It’s further indication that what was happening up here was influencing the rest of neolithic Britain. Ness of Brodgar has turned everything we thought we knew about this period upside down.”

Print and broadcast media have tended to depict people from this age of human development as hairy, knuckle-dragging grunters; in reality they were sophisticated souls who appreciated art and lived peacefully and comfortably for millennia in a well-ordered, non-hierarchical society. Surrounded by sea and rich in pasture, there was plenty to go around.

The excavations going on at Ness of Brodgar and at Whittlesey do not come cheaply, though. They are all made possible by public support, the willingness of volunteers, and pockets here and there of public funding.

The archaeology at Ness of Brodgar will not continue indefinitely. In a few seasons, they will back-fill their excavations and leave these buildings once more in the soil that entombed them for millennia. In time, another group of archaeologists may return, armed with instruments of a heightened technological specification, whereupon this mound might choose to reveal something more of itself.

The Ness of Brodgar dig continues with the kindness of the landowners whose acreage hosts these ruins. Recently, one of them had to sell up but gave the Ness of Brodgar Trust first option to buy. What money the trust received from the local authority and donations was never going to be enough to meet the asking price. A worrying few weeks ensued as the team wondered what might happen to the excavations in the hands of a new landowner. An American benefactor came to the rescue. He bought the land and a house adjoining “for a significant six-figure sum”.

Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, though, has caused a chill in this gathering, as it has in scientific and academic communities up and down the country.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A bronze age socketed axe with a wooden handle, unearthed at Must Farm Quarry, Whittlesey. Photograph: Dave Webb/Cambridge Archaeologic/PA

“Around 28% of scientific projects in this country are funded by EU money,” says Card. “Yet there has been no indication how that money will be replaced. We are grateful for the £40,000 a year we get from Orkney council, but, like many other projects, we always look to other sources of funding as well.”

Gibson talks about the “Ness effect” to the local economy and to the Scottish economy as a whole. “It takes between £10,000 and £15,000 a week to keep this going,” she says. “But even that doesn’t tell the story. We get offers of help from PhD students from all over the world as well as archaeologists from all over the UK who want to work here during their holidays. It costs £350 for each carbon-dating we carry out here.

“In the space of three years, there has been a 26% increase among visitors to Orkney who say that the excavations at Ness of Brodgar were the principal reason for their visit, in a survey conducted by VisitScotland. What is happening here is worth around £600,000 to the local economy. We’ve been getting visitors from all over the world and there’s been huge interest in the US and Australia.”

“The Scottish government currently spends £1.2m a year on archaeology, which is the same as when Margaret Thatcher was in power. If we had found Skara Brae last week we would not have been able to excavate it.”

Card, as well as being director of the site, was also invited to be vice-president of the American Friends of Ness of Brodgar. At the site, a beautifully written and illustrated guide is available, funded by the American group. He is constantly in demand as a speaker at lectures in every state in the US.

“The interest from America in what we have discovered here is incredible,” Card says. “There is another lecture tour there coming up next year and we recently featured as the cover story for National Geographic, which helped spark interest in the States,” he adds. “We have also entered into 18 partnerships and collaborations all over the world.

“Last week, I was approached by a Mexican chap. He had only just read about what was happening here and had immediately hopped on a plane. ‘Where are you staying?’ I asked him. ‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘I’m heading back on the next flight.’ ”

Down at Must Farm in Cambridge, the archaeologists working on the 3,000-year-old bronze age settlement are experiencing the same thrill as their Ness of Brodgar counterparts. In its latest online diary entry there is an effusion: “Since the excavation began, almost every day has revealed new finds, discoveries and information about the late bronze age.

“We’ve found everything from textiles and boxes to wheels and axes. The Must Farm settlement has one of the most complete bronze age assemblages ever discovered in Britain and it is giving us an unprecedented insight into the lives of the people there 3,000 years ago. Two artefact types we haven’t discussed are metalwork and textiles, both of which offer another important layer of detail to the homes we are excavating.”

Before he became a ceramics specialist, Towers was a hugely respected leader-writer and foreign editor on the Glasgow Herald. “The same things that attracted me to newspapers attracts me to archaeology,” he says. “It’s not really about the artefacts we find: it’s about the people and what they did and how they got here, and all their little triumphs and despairs. It’s about us, really.”

In our technological arrogance we believe all progress has been ours. But at Ness of Brodgar and at Must Farm thousands of years ago they did it before us and with an authentic intelligence, not an artificial one.

ANCIENT BRITAIN

Dozens of the earliest texts ever found in Britain, written by the Romans, were found earlier this year. They were inscribed on wooden tablets and found buried in waterlogged ground near St Paul’s Cathedral. The tablets give accounts of life in London in the earliest years of the city’s existence.

In May this year the remains of a medieval chapel which King Arthur is thought to have visited were uncovered after being lost for 50 years. A dig at Beckery Chapel near Glastonbury is expected to date the buildings accurately: the trenches will then be filled in and the position of the chapel marked on the ground.

A Roman villa was found in April underneath a garden near Tisbury in Wiltshire. Historic England confirmed that a mosaic found was part of the floor of a grand villa built between AD175 and 220.

The tomb of Richard III was discovered on the site of the former Greyfriars Church in Leicester in September 2012. It is now a car park.

At Whittlesey in Cambridgeshire there is a bronze age site, still in the relatively early stages of discovery, that is expected to give an unprecedented insight into life around 3,000 years ago and has the potential to be “Britain’s Pompeii”.