ABOUT DRUMADOON PAST 2 PRESENT

Drumadoon Past 2 Present is a blog documenting a multi-period landscape archaeology project focusing on Drumadoon in the island of Arran in Scotland. This is very much a collaborative project with an amazing team of prehistoric and environmental archaeologists from a range of institutions across the UK working in partnership with David Bennett, owner and curator of the Drumadoon Estate.

The long term aspirations of the project are to research and understand a rich prehistoric landscape across Drumadoon, focused on the most complete Neolithic cursus monument found in the UK, but also buried and internationally significant traces of Neolithic and Bronze Age farming.

Learning from prehistory will enable David and his collaborators to develop their goal of rewilding Drumadoon, using prehistory to inform current and future sustainable farming practices.

This blog documents our fieldwork and is a place where you can follow our progress and read about our results as we get them!

The work at Drumadoon is a collaboration between the University of Glasgow (Nicki Whitehouse, Kenny Brophy), Archaeology of Scotland (Gavin MacGregor) and the Universities of Birkbeck (Lesley MacFadyen), Reading (Darko Maricevic), Bournemouth (Emma Jenkins), and Coventry (Michelle Farrell).

The fantastic Archaeology Scotland team working with us are Rebecca Barclay, Fernanda Acosta Ballesteros and Jane Miller.

We have also benefited from the skills of Henry Chapman (Birmingham), Ben Pears and Sam Hudson (Southampton), Aura Bockute and Ewan Campbell (Glasgow), Rebecca Younger (Aberdeen) and Sue Lee (York).

Special thanks to holidaymaking archaeologists who have done much of the dirty work – Dan Sykes and Jacek Gruszczynski! Finally big thanks to all of the students who have worked so hard this season, and out team of volunteers!

DAY 11 – BACKFILLIN’

It is Friday 18th August 2023 and we have come to the end of our #Drumadoon2023 fieldwork season, with the last act today being a lot of backfilling. But this is really just the beginning – keep following this blog for updates and news on the project, post-excavation and sample analysis results, and other Drumadoon goodies.

One main focus of today was completing recording and backfilling Trench 2 (done, with help of newly arrived archaeologist Mark Knight) and this was done with some time (and turf) to spare.

Becca Younger with Glasgow students Gillian and Fiona

The main focus was in Trench 1 where final samples were taken from the cursus bank, and the very long north-facing section was drawn by Katie, Harry, Patrick, Michael and Kenny.

As this happened the trench was backfilled by a tireless team in windy and chilly conditions. There is no mistaking that this was hard work and it took until 230pm for us to be done. What an amazing effort by the team!

And with the last spadeful of rubbish turf, we were done. What a great team, and what an enjoyable season of cursus exploration and scientific innovation.

As I wrote above, keep an eye on this blog for further project updates and news.

I’d like to thank those who provided photos for this blog including Lesley MacFadyen, Gavin MacGregor, Fernanda Acosta Ballesteros and me. Sorry if I missed you out!

Kenny

DAY 10 – MAKING SENSE OF IT ALL

Thursday 17th of August 2023 arrived at last and it did not disappoint. We had a lot of work to do today across all of the sites, and were now aware that we had until no later than 3pm tomorrow to finish. No pressure!

Trench 2 continued to be a focus for activity for a team of students with Rebecca Younger joining us for the last few days and immediately being put in charge of work here, supported by Lesley and Becca. The sequence of cursus bank became clearer with the rhyolite capping on top of the bank lying on various soils and layers that we had found elsewhere, some of these being probable Neolithic soils. There was also a suggestion at this section of the cursus that the bank had either not been completed properly or had been slighted or partially removed in the Neolithic period. Very interesting.

One of the aims of the project is student training, so it is great to see skills like drawing being picked up so confidently.

Sampling was finally completed in Trench FB and the trench was even backfilled which was a mighty day’s work. Now we all need to wait for many months to find out the results of all of their hard work!

Trench 1 was nearing completion, with excavation finished by early afternoon, and even some backfilling possible at either end of the trench. However the morning started with the bizarre sight of Darko doing geophysics around our excavations! He has been finding some very interesting stuff in the cursus terminal area with his resistivity meter.

The drawings of sections started too, a time consuming but vital task that allows us to spend a lot of time thinking about sequences of fills and structures. Measurements are carefully taken of vertical slices through the site (sections) and then drawn at 1:10 scale. This is my favourite thing to do on an excavation.

Glasgow students Gillian and Emma drawing a section

And there is a lot to make sense of in the cursus bank sections that we have exposed! The initial interpretation of this being an earth bank was far too simplistic. In fact this is a monument that probably underwent various phases of construction, with stone layers, walls and kerbs all part of the sequence. A remarkable kerb or collapsed wall structure on the exterior, east, side of the bank is especially exciting, and may have acted to both define and support the bank. It is monumental in its own right.

There are also intriguing suggestions that the monument was slighted or decommissioned at some point, with broken kerb stones and bank material in the kerb area of the monument. One especially interesting stone was a huge rhyolite slab pitched at an unusual angle sitting atop bank material and the natural. This has some interesting markings on it which we felt, on balance, are natural, but this suggests the cursus once had a monumental stone component almost standing-stone like in scale.

By the end of the day we had closed Trench FB, drawing was almost completed in Trench 2 and we had some planning left to do in the main Trench, as well as some thinking, sampling and note-taking. The weather forecast for the final day is not kind so it will be a race to the finish (he writes trying to add some mild peril to our story). Tune in for the final excavation instalment tomorrow!

Kenny

DAY 9 – THE NATURAL

Wednesday 16th of August and there is a sense that time is running out for this season of the excavation. We’re working on several fronts today – sampling in Trench FB, trying to get to the bottom of Trench 1, and in Trench 2 cleaning continued. The team is spread across the Drumadoon landscape which is sort of what the project is all about. Gavin MacGregor and Lesley MacFadyen also began hosting a two day event bringing archaeologists and artists together, working with artist Eòghann Mac Colla and Arran Theatre and Arts Trust. Busy times.

Let’s start with Trench 1 where the search for the fabled natural has being going on for a year now. The ‘natural’ is a term archaeologists use to describe a natural subsoil or stone that underlies humanly created layers, sometimes bedrock, sometimes pea gravel, clay or sand. This is the bottom of the site and where we can stop digging, although often we explore features such as pits cut into this natural surface. The natural can be deceptive – it may have been disturbed by humans and moved around, redeposited natural, which can be difficult to tell from the actual untouched natural.

In Trench 1 we finally found what we were looking for thanks to a lot of hard work and mattocking. In particular Dan and Jacek dug their way in a controlled fashion through a lot of soils and stones towards the base of the bank, or bank collapse material. This was a masterclass in controlled aggression on site and our students hugely benefited from working with them.

Glasgow archaeology students Katie and Patrick under the watchful eyes of Jacek and Dan

The natural here is a compact orange sandy gravel layer, quite distinctive, and it was running beneath everything in the trench. Here’s Gavin getting excited about the the natural and the cursus sequence!

This orange surface, shown in the photo above at the base of the cursus ditch, gave us a level to work to and allowed us to establish that the lower stone and silt layers in the trench were either part of the bank or activities that took place before its construction, so likely Neolithic soils. So we sampled them a lot for analysis back in the lab.

Talking of samples, towards the end of the day, Sam Hudson of Southampton Uni came along to take samples from the bank for sedaDNA analysis. He was helped by Henry Chapman of Time Team fame. These samples, painstakingly removed in wee tubes, may allow us to determine if there is any genetic material in bank sediments (scraped from the surrounding landscape) from plants, humans or animals. Amazing!

By this point in the day there was a real energy around the trench, with artists on site talking to us and sketching us, and rapid record-keeping being done, along with the sound of the trowel and the mattock, a uniquely archaeological space. Busy, a bit stressful, but everyone in the zone.

From art to science! In the FB Trench opened east of the cursus, a team of samplers were hard at work trying to make sense of soil sequences and taking samples. Today alone 175 samples were taken for a whole range of forms of post-excavation analysis as described by Nicki earlier this week. Here is Nicki proudly in the trench with some of the sample tags!

Back in Trench 2, work continued to unpick the relationship between the cursus bank interior edge and the soils beneath it, under the watchful eyes of Lesley MacFadyen and Rebecca Barclay. A small team of students and volunteers did some fine work today, both digging but also drawing. More on this tomorrow.

Oh and we had a visitor at lunchtime in the form of an adder which crawled over Henry’s stomach!

Kenny

DAY 8 – THE CRUNCH

Tuesday 15th August 2023 is when we reached the crunch both in terms of the two excavation trenches but also the sampling and environmental programme of work. A crack team of archaeological scientists got the ferry over to Arran last night to join the team, and we even survived Kenny disappearing for 4 hours to give a lecture to a big audience of local folk in Brodick. We also had a visit from Angela Gannon and Georgina Brown of HES to give their official seal of approval!

Let’s start in Trench 3. Under the careful watch of Lesley and her mattock, this smallish trench located in the cursus interior is now bearing fruits even if we don’t quite catch the geophysical anomaly we wanted to. The trench includes the interior edge of the cursus eastern bank and so it has been invaluable to reveal this and compare with what we have found 100m to the south in Trench 1 and 2 (latter in 2022). This demonstrates that the rhyolite ‘capping’ on the cursus bank is not localised to where we had dug before and may well be a remarkable element of the complete 1.1km bank. This stone would have been shiny and made the monument stand out in the landscape, rather like chalk cursus monuments in southern England. This might have been about inspiring awe in visitors and cursus users. Great job team!

Back to main Trench 1 where, when planning was completed, the team began to investigate (a) the stone layer beneath the bank, and (b) whether there is a ditch on the exterior side of the bank or not.

Cursus monuments usually have ditches but this doesn’t mean it has to have one! See simplistic cross-section above for what we might find. The area where the ditch might be is full of really big stones and some mixed stone types. Investigation into this today showed that in this area of the trench there is a light brown silt-sand layer and a lot of stones, which could be indicative of a ditch fill. More tomorrow.

The stone layer beneath the bank seems quite thin, with a dark brown to black greasy soil layer amongst and under the stones. This might – and we emphasise might – be a Neolithic soil horizon. No artefacts have been found at this depth so far but we have a level to work to. But we are moving on from the thoughts we had a few days ago that this layer is natural, it seems likely to be anthropomorphic (humans did it!).

Darko continued geophysics but the most important work carried out today will now be described by Nicki – and it worth waiting for!

Today we investigated some of the buried soils we augered near the field boundary we excavated last summer. Seeing these soils in the section of a newly excavated trench gives us the chance to visualise what we were seeing in the cores. We chose an area of deeper soils and sediments, adjacent to a clearance cairn. The clearance cairn appears to have at least three phases of deposition.

FB2 trench with cairn stones shown at the far end of the trench (Photo: N. Whitehouse)

The variation across the area was quite stark, with soils under the cairn showing great complexity due to sediments accumulating around and on top of the stone beneath the peat. Below the peats, we encountered two separate soils, separated by colluvial silty sands, an iron pan above a truncated forest soil. These sit on top of glacial sands and gravel. The whole sequence is very exciting and tomorrow we will be sampling for sedaDNA, pollen, phytoliths, soil micromorphology, radiocarbon and OSL dating, pXRF, pOSL, LOI, mag suss, particle size analysis, lipids stanols and leaf waxes. Tomorrow will be an exciting day – watch this space!

Going deeper into the trench, showing soils and sediments beneath the cairn structure

Thanks Nicki, and thanks also to the crack team – Sam, Ben, Michelle, Henry – on site today to support this work. It is exciting bringing such a great team to Arran!

Kenny

DAY 7 – MONDAY!!

Monday 14th August 2023 (not BC). Back on site, the sun had it’s hat on, and after some initial sponging and pumping, the trenches were dry and ready to work on again. The Glasgow Uni students got a treat in the morning, going down to King’s Caves, to talk art and archaeology. On the excavation front things started to get very interesting.

Trench 1, the main slot through the cursus bank, was at the stage where recording was needed before we could go any further. So throughout the day, Kenny (me) planned the trench base. This is an analogue method using pencil and permatrace (waterproof drafting paper) to draw the archaeology at 1:20 scale. A 1m square planning frame and a big rubber accompanied Kenny (me) across 6 or so hours of back-aching bending over, drawing hundreds of wee stones across an area some 16m by 2m.

Kenny planning, David pumping

The final plan is by no means a 100% accurate representation of the trench base but it does serves as a valuable record of patterns and features before we excavate them further. The archaeology is also recorded photographically and in many cases nowadays via 3d scanning or drone.

In the afternoon the students got a trowelling masterclass from Gavin MacGregor and started to dip their trowels into the layers immediately beneath the bank. The results of what they find in the coming days will be crucial to making sense of this monument.

Work in Trench 3 continued and more on the fruits of this tomorrow, another crucial location where work is happening. Out in the wilds Nicki Whitehouse and her team started to open up a slot trench that will be where a series of samples will be taken in the coming days. Darko continued resistivity in the cursus terminal area and is getting some very interesting results. There is a lot of buried archaeology and information at Drumadoon!

In the evening, we took the students to visit a reconstructed Bronze Age roundhouse at Brodick Castle grounds. This is based on a hut circle excavated by John Barber’s team back in the day in the Machrie landscape.

Many thanks to Corinna Goeckeritz for showing us the house and passing round the musical instruments. I am pretty sure there is some amazing footage of the resulting cacophany on social media!

Kenny

DAY 6 – WATERLOGGED

Sunday 13th August 2023, the day after the day off. We had an open day, visited Machrie Moor, and used up all of our sponges emptying brown water from our trenches. Memorable!!

Rain in the morning meant that we took the chance to visit Machrie Moor, one of the most amazing prehistoric landscapes in Britain. Lots of stone circles, some of them very funky, are what draws the visitors, but what lies beneath is in many ways more significant. Hidden timber circles, prehistoric field systems, ancient soils. You can find out more about Machrie Moor on the brilliant Stone Me podcast featuring our very own Kenny Brophy (me).

In the afternoon we ran an open day in Shiskine community hall. Organised by Archaeology Scotland, there were talks, and a chance to have a close look at artefacts found during the three seasons of work at Drumadoon and some replicas of stone tools found from Arran’s rich Neolithic past. It was busy all afternoon and the public who came along asked some cracking questions. Students from Glasgow Uni got a chance to meet visitors and so some public archaeology, and they did a great job.

The rest of the team got back up onto Drumadoon and found the trenches were full of murky brown water, rain filtered through the peat. So the afternoon was mostly taken up using buckets and sponges to empty the trenches out so we could continue excavation.

This was not fun. But by removing the water, we are able to move to the next stage of our excavations tomorrow! Fare thee well.

Kenny

DAY 5 – A LOVELY POEM

As today was the day off, let us share with you a poem written by volunteer Helen about her experience of digging at Drumadoon. We love it! Thanks for allowing us to share this Helen.

DRUMADOON

Drumadoon,

The very sound of that name echoes mystery, 

A climb through ferns and rushes and peat, then a magnificent vista

Of mountains and moorland.

Drumadoon 

A neolithic wonder.

And today, the chance to explore,

To dig deep to foundations of history,

And hold in my hand a smooth, crafted pitchstone.

Last touched by whom all those millennia ago?

Did they ever think I would hold their treasure?

Did I ever think I would hold their treasure?

A connection, an honour.

Drumadoon,

It reaches back beyond the time of memory,

It reaches forward to times unknown,

It belongs to us all and it belongs to no-one.

Drumadoon 

A word and a place to send shivers down spines

Drumadoon. 

Helen How 

Archaelogical dig volunteer and writer

Arran August 2023

Copywrite Helen How  2023 

DAY 4 – A TRICKY TRENCH!

Friday 11th August AKA Day 4 saw excavation work continue in Trench 1 (the big trench) and Lesley and Gavin got stuck into Trench 3a (the small boggy trench). Darko did some geophysics on the cursus southern terminal. Nicki, Emma and Sue disappeared into the bog with a giant corkscrew. Updates!

Work in the big trench was supported by the presence of the legendary Dr Ewan Campbell who joined us for a day. His geological knowledge helped him to sniff out a local quarry with exposed natural bedrock, helping us to move towards interpreting jumbled stone at the base of the cursus bank as being a natural disturbed glacial till and boulder clay natural.

However some very large stones on the exterior side of the cursus bank are less obviously natural and there is a hint – the merest suggestion – that there may be a ditch here with large stone fragments tipping in. Excavation next week once we have completed planning the trench, and results from Darko’s geophysics in the terminal area of the cursus , will hopefully answer the ditch conundrum one way or another. Watch this space.

Blue circles = possible broken standing stone / David Bennett of Drumadoon digging!

The smaller trench, north along the cursus bank, supervised by the dream team of Lesley MacFadyen and Gavin MacGregor, plus a team of hardcore deturfing enthusiasts, finally got rid of all of the peat and were able to begin cleaning beneath this. So far, stones on the east side of the trench have been found, and we reckon that these are stones from the cursus bank, rather like we found in 2021-22. This is the boggiest wettest trench I have ever seen so hats of to the team!

Geoarchaeological work continued in the wilds, and this phase of the season’s work came to an end today. But the environmental and sampling programme goes up a gear next week – watch this space again!

Tomorrow is the day off and it is going to rain.

Kenny

DAY 3 – HARD WORK!!

Thursday 10th August – today in the Drumadoon project, we reached the stage that most excavations and fieldwork projects get to at some point – a lot of hard work combined with a lot of pondering with regards to what we have found so far and what to do next. Excavation is rarely a simple linear process and involves as much brain power as physical labour, and both were in abundance today. Kenny Brophy will provide something of an update.

As with yesterday the team was spread across the Drumadoon landscape – there was a bit of excavation including the opening of Trench 3a, some geophysics, geoarchaeological survey work and even some gazebo manipulation due to forthcoming strong wind.

In the main trench, we were finally able to move beyond 2022 and get down and deeper into the Neolithic. The trench was cleaned, and we began to carefully mattock bank material away while sieving material removed from the trench. This resulted in us recovering several worked lithics and flakes.

The archaeology in Trench 1 is complex and we are still trying to make sense of the cursus bank both in terms of the scale of the earthwork but also what role the many stones used to make the bank played. We knew that there was a stone capping on top of the bank but we have also found a layer of stones beneath the bank plus some very big stones lying on the east side of the bank. We have not been able to resolve this yet but that is not unusual in excavations – these are as much dialogues as physical technical processes. Hopefully we can be more positive tomorrow.

The stone layer beneath the bank – we’re still cleaning this and trying to make sense of it

Meanwhile a small team opened up a new trench in the location of a geophysical anomaly that HES recorded in 2021. There is a chance that there may be a line of posts or pits parallel to the cursus bank on the monument exterior and we wanted to explore this tantalising possibility. Deturfing this trench was hard work! At this stage the turf / peat has been removed and there seems to be some archaeology in the form of a concentration of stones in this trench, but that is as far as we have got to for the time being. More tomorrow!

Kenny

DAY 2 – BACK TO THE NEOLITHIC

Day 2 – 9th August 2023 – today the team split up into smaller teams to work across the landscape using various fancy (and old-fashioned) bits of equipment. Some of the work we have been doing will be discussed below, and look out for more info from more team members in the coming days. Today we have an update on the excavations by Kenny Brophy.

Let’s start with progress at Trench 1 – this is where we worked last year, cutting a trench measuring 16m by 2m through the cursus bank to understand the nature and extent of the cursus bank, and find evidence for date and what lies beneath. The cursus is a massive earthwork discovered by Historic Environment Scotland (HES) discovered during a LiDAR landscape survey. The cursus may date to 3500-3000BC and is 1.1km long and 45m wide – a massive earthwork.

Plan of Drumadoon cursus (c) HES

Today we got back to where we finished in 2022. Our trench is very close to the southern end of the cursus. This means that in two days of work we have shifted all of the soil we backfilled into the trench and now are back right in the heart of the massive cursus bank. It is becoming clearer even with no new digging into the monument that this is a complex and very big earthwork. The bank may be 10 metres wide and up to 1.5m in height, made from a mixture of soils, turves, and a lot of big stones. How these relate to one another remains unclear. We also are continuing to investigate whether there is a ditch on the outside of the bank, we can’t rule this out.

The trench has now been cleaned with trowels and tomorrow we are ready to start to dig further into the bank material. One piece of burnt flint was found today and we are hopeful of finding more lithics – and lots of answers – in the days to come!

Survey work also started today – magnetometry geophysical survey east of the cursus with Darko Maricevic…

…and digital GPS survey work with Lorraine McEwan.

Lorraine and Patrick with the dGPS

York student Sue Lee with peats and soils in the corer

Over to Prof Nicki Whitehouse on the Geoarchaeology coring.

Today we have been coring the prehistoric soils we found last year and tracing their extent within the area of the field wall we excavated last summer. We trained students to use different augers, recording soils and sediments and interpreting these. We found that the soil distribution is highly variable across the site and we would like to better understand this. To help this, we will be opening up a larger area next week to sample the soils for pollen, phytoliths, soil micromorphology, sedaDNA, radiocarbon dating and soil content.

Students interpreting the core

The students really enjoyed the experience of coring – see this video! And learned to use Munsell colour charts and describe soils and sediments.

Using the soil Munsell colour charts

Finally some excitement – our first find, which caused massive happiness amongst the Archaeology Scotland team!!

More tomorrow

Kenny and Nicki