Professor Ian Ralston entertained us with an engrossing talk on the development of interpretations of the Doon Hill archaeological remains, long thought to represent British/Anglian timber halls. Ian’s prelude to the re-interpretation of the material is as follows
“Doon Hill, at the east end of the Lothian Plain, the location of the Scottish army before the 1650 battle (Dunbar) which resulted in its defeated soldiers languishing in Durham, is still the only archaeological site anywhere in Scotland which was spotted as a cropmark from the air subsequently to be marked out in coloured concrete for the public to visit. Discovered by Dr St Joseph of Cambridge in 1959, it was dug between 1964 and 1966 by Brian Hope-Taylor, the renowned excavator of the Yeavering Anglo-British palace complex, near Wooler in Northumberland. Although the evidence was never published, Doon Hill was presented as the superimposed remains of two mid-first-millennium AD timber halls, set within a palisaded enclosure and with accompanying graves. The older hall was envisaged as indigenous British (and so Celtic), its replacement as distinctively Anglian and thus signalling the expansion of the English into Lothian in the seventh century. Around 1980, this hypothesis faced its first challenge when a major building not dissimilar to the British hall at Doon Hill was dug in Kincardineshire and – despite doubts then vociferously expressed – eventually demonstrated incontrovertibly to be well over four thousand years older. Sixty years after its initial discovery, how should Hope-Taylor’s site on Doon Hill now be interpreted?”
The older hall (Hall A) was around 24 metres long and about 12metres wide, represented by a post hole outline. It had been burned down and, not long after, a new, smaller hall (Hall B) was constructed within the footprint of the old one. There were features of Hall B which were interpreted to resemble those of the undoubtedly Anglo/British hall at Yeavering, previously excavated and described by Hope-Taylor. Hence the Dark Ages date, and the suggestion that the two halls represented the earlier British one (Hall A) which was burned down and perhaps replaced by the Anglic Hall B around the time the Northumbrian/Bernician Angles were expanding their territory into southern Scotland.
Although he presented, in the late 1960s, an ITV television programme on the Doon Hill site, showing maps of the excavated features, Hope-Taylor did not publish his findings in detail in academic papers (see above). The original evidence from the dig was retained in his possession and was not made available in its entirety to his peers. On Hope-Taylor’s death in 2001, the release of his papers allowed a searching re-analysis. Meanwhile, in the second half of the 1970s, Ian Ralston, then at the University of Aberdeen, and his colleagues conducted an archaeological dig on the remains of a hall, of similar structure to Hall A, at Balbridie. It had many features in common with the Doon Hill Hall, and was expected to be a Pictish edifice, also dating to the Dark Ages (say 500 – 700 AD). However, charcoal from the post holes was carbon dated to around 3,800 BC – the early Neolithic. This rather set the cat among the archaeological community pigeons! Various reasons were proposed to explain this “misleading” data in an effort to support a Dark Age date. However, the matter was conclusively resolved by radiocarbon dates for ancient cereal grains found on site which confirmed that the hall was Neolithic.
So what now for the Doon Hill Halls? The site data held by Hope-Taylor was not quite as clearcut as he had presented, with significant doubt over the features of the smaller hall which had been ascribed to the Anglian period. In addition, more recent radiocarbon dating, and identification of pottery sherds, placed both Hall A and Hall B firmly in the Neolithic period at around 3000 to 3800 BC. Hence from a progression of interpretations from Hall A as Dark Age British and Hall B a later but still Dark Age Anglian construction, to Hall A being neolithic and Hall B Anglian, we reach the current situation in which the evidence points to both being Neolithic. This says much for the skills of an ancient people: making large, squared posts from tree trunks using stone tools, and building a large, complex buildings. The context is a continuum of ancient British constructions requiring sophisticated techniques, like Scara Brae in Orkney (dated to 3000 – 3500 BC) and Stonehenge (dating between 2000 – 3100 BC, although there is evidence for earlier wooden structures).
Peter R