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Later prehistoric vegetation dynamics and Bronze Age agriculture at Hobbister, Orkney, Scotland

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Abstract

The Bronze Age in Britain was a time of major social and cultural changes, reflected in the division of the landscape into field systems and the establishment of new belief systems and ritual practices. Several hypotheses have been advanced to explain these changes, and assessment of many of them is dependent on the availability of detailed palaeoenvironmental data from the sites concerned. This paper explores the development of a later prehistoric landscape in Orkney, where a Bronze Age field system and an apparently ritually-deposited late Bronze Age axe head are located in an area of deep blanket peat from which high-resolution palaeoenvironmental sequences have been recovered. There is no indication that the field system was constructed to facilitate agricultural intensification, and it more likely reflects a cultural response to social fragmentation associated with a more dispersed settlement pattern. There is evidence for wetter conditions during the later Bronze Age, and the apparent votive deposit may reflect the efforts of the local population to maintain community integrity during a time of perceptible environmental change leading to loss of farmland. The study emphasises the advantages of close integration of palaeoenvironmental and archaeological data for interpretation of prehistoric human activity. The palaeoenvironmental data also provide further evidence for the complexity of prehistoric woodland communities in Orkney, hinting at greater diversity than is often assumed. Additionally, differing dates for woodland decline in the two sequences highlight the dangers of over-extrapolation from trends observed in a single pollen profile, even at a very local scale.

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Acknowledgements

Fieldwork at Hobbister was financially supported by the University of Hull and a Quaternary Research Association New Research Worker’s Award. Funding for radiocarbon dates was provided by Historic Scotland. This work formed part of my PhD, which was funded by a University of Hull Studentship. Thanks are due to Jane Bunting, Nanna Karlsson and Paula Milburn, who provided assistance in the field, and to Highland Park Distillery for allowing access to the site. I am grateful to Nick Card of the Orkney Research Centre for Archaeology (ORCA) for the loan of survey equipment, and to Paul Sharman of ORCA for sharing his unpublished report on the archaeological survey at Hobbister. Thanks to Lisa Coyle-McClung and Chris Hunt for help with Tilia and Adobe Illustrator, and to Jane Bunting for drafting Fig. 8. Finally, this manuscript was greatly improved by the constructive comments of Jane Bunting, two anonymous reviewers and the editor.

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  1. Michelle Farrell

    Present address: School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, BT7 1NN, UK

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  1. Department of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences, University of Hull, Cottingham Road, Hull, HU6 7RX, UK

    Michelle Farrell

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Correspondence to Michelle Farrell.

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Communicated by M. O'Connell.

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Farrell, M. Later prehistoric vegetation dynamics and Bronze Age agriculture at Hobbister, Orkney, Scotland. Veget Hist Archaeobot 24, 467–486 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-014-0507-6

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