The Importance of Skara Brae - Research Paper Example

The first professional excavations were concluded under the supervision of Gordon Childe, the Professor of Archeology from Glasgow University started excavating the site. The first houses were built about 3200 BC and people lived there for about six hundred years. Significantly, the village did not grow much since the time it was first built, even though about 8 generations of people passes through it. The area does not have many woods around, houses and furniture inside is made of stones, which also contributed to the village being well preserved, even though not all the houses were built or occupied at the same time.

There are eight distinct houses in the settlement; each is a single-room. The floor space of each house is about 36 square meters and the walls were about three meters high. Early houses were built circular. The houses are built of the closely fitting flat stone slabs. The doorways and winding passages are low, which was preventing the winds from rushing in. There is a fire place in the central hearth. The houses are half in the ground, all huddled together and therefore insulated from the Atlantic weather, so it all made up for a very warm and cozy dwelling.

The whole settlement is built inside the heap of decomposed vegetable matter, animal bones, stone and shells. There is furniture inside each house, all of which is “fitted” and made of stone. There are large stone dressers with two shelves supported on three stone legs, bedsteads, small water tanks set into the floor and rectangular seats, storage places made of stone boxes and cells in the floor and the walls. The dresser in each house is positioned in such a way that whoever would enter the house would see the display of items on the dresser.

The houses are linked with each other by series of roofed tunnels, each has one entrance, most have bolt-securing hole cut in the stone to lock a stone slab door from inside. The other marvel of Skara Brae is sophisticated underground sewage disposal system made up of the stone built drainage channels which connected the houses to an outfall at the sea edge. The drains were made of stone and were lined up with the tree bark. This drainage system even may have included early form of toilet facilities.

The roofs of the houses were supported either by driftwood or whalebone beams. Since the roofs are gone now, we can assume it was made of perishable materials. It is gone now and we can see inside. Since all houses are equipped similarly and are similar in size, and there is nothing that looks like a dwelling of a chief, it is thought that Skara Brae is a settlement of people of equal rights. It seems the village was abandoned suddenly for dweller left behind even some valuables. What was the reason we can only speculate.

There are not many places in the world that has a virtually intact village that is 5,000 year old. This is Europe’s best preserved and most complete Neolithic village. It is older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids. In 1999 as a part of “The Heart of Neolithic Orkney” Skara Brae gained a status of UNESCO World Heritage Site. Skara Brae has particularly rich remarkably preserved remains of both furniture as well as wide range of domestic and ritual artifacts, drawings and symbols. All the remains with exceptional completeness gave us the picture of domestic, cultural and ritual practices of the