Knap of Howar

Information about Knap of Howar

Enlarge picture
The main house now looks out over the sea.
Enlarge picture
Looking back through the low entrance doorway into the main house, a visitor's rucksack gives an idea of scale.


At Knap of Howar on the Orkney island of Papa Westray, a Neolithic farmstead has been wonderfully well preserved, and is claimed to be the oldest preserved stone house in northern Europe, with radiocarbon dating showing that it was occupied from 3500 BC to 3100 BC, earlier than the very similar houses in the settlement at Skara Brae.

The farmstead consists of two adjacent rounded rectangular thick walled buildings with very low doorways facing to sea, the larger and older linked by a low passageway to the other which has been interpreted as a workshop or a second house. They were constructed on an earlier midden, and surrounded by midden material which has protected them. There are no windows, and they were presumably lit by a hole in the roof to let out smoke. They stand close to the shore, but when originally built lay inland. The shore shows how the local stone splits into thin slabs, giving a ready source of construction material.

The walls still stand to an eaves height of 1.6m, and the stone furniture is intact giving a vivid impression of life in the house. Fireplaces, partition screens, beds and storage shelves are almost intact, and post holes were found indicating the roof structure.

Evidence from the middens shows that the inhabitants were keeping cattle, sheep and pigs, cultivating barley and wheat and gathering shellfish as well as fishing for species which have to be line caught using boats.

Finds of finely made and decorated Unstan ware pottery link the inhabitants to chambered cairn tombs nearby and to sites far afield including Balbrindie and Eilean Domhnuill.

See also

  • Prehistoric Scotland - Farmers and monument builders

References

  • Scotland Before History - Stuart Piggott, Edinburgh University Press 1982, ISBN 0-85224-348-0
  • Scotland's Hidden History - Ian Armit, Tempus (in association with Historic Scotland) 1998, ISBN 0-7486-6067-4
  • The Other Orkney Book - Gordon Thomson, Northabout Publishing 1980, ISBN 0-907200-00-1

External links

Coordinates:
Orkney
Àrcaibh


Flag of Orkney Coat of arms
Location

Geography

Area Ranked 16th
 - Total 990 km²
 - % Water ?
Admin HQ Kirkwall
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Papa Westray

Location

OS grid reference: HY488518

Names

Gaelic name:
Norse name: Papey Meiri
Meaning of name: Old Norse for 'big priest's island'.
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Neolithic[1] or "New" Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology that is traditionally the last part of the Stone Age. The Neolithic era follows the terminal Holocene Epipalaeolithic
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and
35th century
←← ↔ →→


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and
31st century
←← ↔ →→


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For the music group, see .


Skara Brae (pronounced /ˈskɑrə breɪ/) is a large stone-built Neolithic settlement, located on the Bay of Skaill on the west coast of mainland
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The three-letter acronym SEA may refer to:
  • Scientists and Engineers for America, a pro-science political advocacy group.
  • Schoof-Elkies-Atkin algorithm
  • Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (IATA: SEA, ICAO: KSEA)
  • Sea Education Association

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midden, also known as kitchen middens, is a dump for domestic waste. The word is of Scandinavian via Middle English derivation, but is used by archaeologists worldwide to describe any kind of feature containing waste products relating to day-to-day human life.
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Balanced Rock stands in Garden of the Gods park in Colorado Springs, CO]] A rock is a naturally occurring aggregate of minerals and/or mineraloids. The Earth's lithosphere is made of rock. In general rocks are of three types, namely, igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic.
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eave is the edge of a roof. Eaves usually project beyond the side of the building generally to provide weather protection. Some buildings, such as Craftsman bungalows, have very wide eaves with decorative brackets.
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Sus
Linnaeus, 1758

Species

Sus barbatus
Sus bucculentus†
Sus cebifrons
Sus celebensis
Sus domestica
Sus falconeri†
Sus heureni

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H. vulgare

Binomial name
Hordeum vulgare
L.

Barley (Hordeum vulgare) is an annual cereal grain, which serves as a major animal feed crop, with smaller amounts used for malting and in
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Shellfish is a culinary term for aquatic invertebrates used as food: molluscs, crustaceans, and echinoderms. Both saltwater and freshwater invertebrates are considered shellfish. Shellfish is a misnomer, because these invertebrates are definitely not fish.
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Fishing is the activity of hunting for fish by hooking, trapping, or gathering. By extension, the term fishing is applied to pursuing other aquatic animals such as various types of shellfish, squid, octopus, turtles, frogs, and some edible marine invertebrates.
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Unstan ware is the name used by archaeologists for a type of finely made and decorated Neolithic pottery from the 4th millennium BC. Typical are elegant, round based bowls with a band of grooved patterning below the rim.
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A chambered cairn is a burial monument, usually constructed during the Neolithic, consisting of a cairn of stones inside which a sizeable (usually stone) chamber was constructed. Some chambered cairns are also passage-graves.
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Armit identifies the islet of Eilean Domhnuill, Loch Olabhat on North Uist, Scotland as what may be the earliest crannog. Unstan ware pottery found there suggests a Neolithic period date of 3200-2800 BC.
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The British national grid reference system is a system of geographic grid references commonly used in Great Britain, different from using latitude or longitude.

The Ordnance Survey (OS) devised the national grid reference system, and it is heavily used in their survey data,
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geographic coordinate system enables every location on the earth to be specified by the three coordinates of a spherical coordinate system aligned with the spin axis of the Earth.
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