Skara Brae is a stone-built Neolithic village beside the Bay of Skaill on Mainland, Orkney, off northern Scotland. The site was occupied from roughly 3180 BC to around 2500 BC and is Europe's most complete Neolithic village. Skara Brae gained UNESCO World Heritage Site status as one of four sites making up "The Heart of Neolithic Orkney".

Discovery and early exploration

In the winter of 1850, a severe storm hit Scotland, causing widespread damage and over 200 deaths. In the Bay of Skaill, the storm stripped earth from a large irregular knoll. When the storm cleared, local villagers found the outline of a village consisting of several small houses without roofs. William Graham Watt of Skaill House, a son of the local laird who was a self-taught geologist, began an amateur excavation of the site, but after four houses were uncovered, work was abandoned in 1868.

The site remained undisturbed until 1913, when during a single weekend, the site was plundered by a party with shovels who took away an unknown quantity of artefacts. In 1924, another storm swept away part of one of the houses, and it was determined the site should be secured and properly investigated. The job was given to the University of Edinburgh's Professor V. Gordon Childe, who travelled to Skara Brae for the first time in mid-1927.

In 2019, a series of photographs showing Childe and four women at the site of the excavation were re-examined. It had been widely believed that the women were tourists or local women visiting the excavation site, but a note on the back of the photographs identified the women as "4 of lady students", and it seems that they were active participants in the excavation. The women have been tentatively identified as Margaret Simpson (who was acknowledged in Childe's monographs about Skara Brae), Margaret Mitchell, Mary Kennedy, and Margaret Cole.

Neolithic lifestyle

Each dwelling was entered through a low doorway with a stone slab door which could be shut "by a bar made of bone that slid in bar-holes cut in the stone door jambs." A series of drains have been built underneath at least five of the houses, although the extent of this system has not been fully mapped.

Seven of the houses have similar furniture, with the beds and dressers in the same places in each house. The dresser stands against the wall opposite the door and is the first thing anyone entering the dwelling sees. Each of these houses had a larger bed on the right side of the doorway and a smaller one on the left. Lloyd Laing noted that this pattern accorded with Hebridean custom up to the early 20th century, suggesting that the husband's bed was the larger and the wife's was the smaller. The discovery of beads and paint pots in some of the smaller beds may support this interpretation.

Artefacts

Enigmatic carved stone balls have been found at the site and some are on display in the museum. Similar objects have been found throughout northern Scotland. The spiral ornamentation on some of these "balls" has been stylistically linked to objects found in the Boyne Valley in Ireland. Similar symbols have been found carved into stone lintels and bed posts. These symbols, sometimes referred to as "runic writings", have been subjected to controversial translations. For example, author Rodney Castleden suggested that "colons" found punctuating vertical and diagonal symbols may represent separations between words.

Other artefacts excavated on site made of animal, fish, bird, and whalebone, whale and walrus ivory, and orca teeth included awls, needles, knives, beads, adzes, shovels, small bowls and, remarkably, ivory pins up to 25 centimetres (9.8 in) long. These pins are similar to examples found in passage graves in the Boyne Valley, another piece of evidence suggesting a linkage between the two cultures. The eponymous Skaill knife was a commonly used tool in Skara Brae; it consists of a large stone flake, with a sharp edge used for cutting, knocked off a sandstone cobble. This neolithic tool is named after Skara Brae's location in the Bay of Skaill on Orkney. Skaill knives have been found throughout Orkney and Shetland.