Archaeology of Trees

I joined the Lorn Archaeological and Historical Society a couple months ago. It's the first group I've joined here and payed dues for. First I received their lovely little magazine, Historic Argyll issue no. 12, with its matte blue cover featuring a Celtic cross design with dragons and ships and knots.

The magazine contains articles entitled 'Whisky and Resistance: The Archaeology of Illicit Distilling', 'John Stuart McCaig, His Family and His Tower' and 'The Social, Economic and Environmental Effect of Tourism on Oban between 1750 and 1914'.

Fantastic! I'm finding out all sorts of interesting things about this area. For instance, I learned from a previous issue of Historic Argyll that Lochavullin (the Mill Loch) a flat area just below our house on Glenshellach Road, was drained in the late 1800s and a crannog was found beneath the water.

Crannogs are man-made rocky islands in lochs that ancient people built for protection from invaders or wolves. The oldest ones might be over 5,000 years old. In Loch Awe near here, twenty crannogs have been found and excavated.

Now the exact spot of the Lochavullin crannog is unknown but it's thought to be somewhere near the Oban Times building--on Crannog Lane!

Now that tourist season is officially over, the local groups have all started getting active. Year-round residents have to find lots to keep themselves occupied during the long, dark and stormy winters, so community organizations put on winter lecture series or winter concerts or winter running meets or whatever. You've got to have something to get you out of the house and socializing with other people!

So Andy and I went to the first Lorn Archaeological and Historical Society lecture in their Winter Lecture Programme on Friday--'The Archaeology of Trees: the Neolithic in Scotland'.

Here's the abstract:

It is difficult for most of us today to imagine what it would be like to live in a wooded environment, but in Neolithic Scotland (4000-2500 BC) everyday life was surrounded by the forest. Trees and woodland are rarely studied in any detail in prehistoric archaeology as they often only leave fragmentary traces in the archaeological record. However, timber formed an important resource in the Neolithic. This talk will outline the ways in which Neolithic communities in Scotland drew on the symbolism of the forest in everyday life and in constructing ceremonial monuments.

It was a full house at the St. Moluag Center--on a Friday night too. It was thoroughly engaging and fascinating--the young professor had spent his summer digging trenches excavating one of the largest neolithic timber monuments known in Britain, at Forteviot (also the supposed site of the later palace of Kenneth MacAlpine, the first king of united Scotland in the 800s).

He explained how the neolithic people lived in a primeval forest unlike those we know today, with giant trees two meters in diameter and dense undergrowth. The forest would have formed their entire world-view, and their religious and ceremonial practices emerged from their interaction with these endless forests.

They built huge, unbelievable monuments made of felled trees mounted upright in the ground, sometimes hundreds of these giant trunks creating enclosures or ceremonial palisades many kilometers across. They created circular monuments of these timber posts, sometimes with many concentric rings.

You can't imagine the size of these things... the timber structures extended sometimes for miles and the enclosures were so vast that they could contain an airport. These monuments are so big that modern people haven't even noticed them. How is this?

All that's left, now, are dark scabs on the earth where the post holes were dug and these enormous tree trunks erected. The way we find them is by aerial photography. The patterns of dots arranged in neat circles and rows, staring up out of a stubbly cornfield, are almost shocking to see.

The most wonderful thing about Neolithic archaeology, it seems to me, is the amount of imagination it requires to study this era in human history. So little record is left of human activity from that time, and that that does remain is mysterious, crude and monumental. Stone axes. Shards, bones, tombs. Great circles on the earth, mounted in stones or in vanished ancient timber, tree trunks larger than any we have seen for millennia.

I wish I were an archaeologist!