Craig Ferguson travels to Orkney, ‘the Egypt of the North’and speculates on how our society will be remembered after we are gone.
He looks at Skara Brae, a 5000 year old Neolithic village on Orkney.He meets Dr David Clark, an archaeologist who tells him about Gordon Charles. He also was an archaeologist, perhaps one of the most eminent of the 19th century.
Skara Brae was discovered in 1850 after it emerged from a large dune after a storm. Gordon Charles believed that was why the village was abandoned – that is, it was overwhelmed by sand.
Dr Clark strongly disagrees with this, believing that a changing society resulted in the abandonment of the village. He thinks the people just dispersed out into the landscape, building individual homes or farmsteads. Young people moved away and the village community simply died out.
He points out that the early hunter-gatherers also had good lives, based on the studies of contemporary gatherers, who are reckoned only to work for about one and a half days a week. The original folk of Skara Brae had comparatively straightforward access to high-quality foods, ranging from lamb steaks and lobster to a good selection of plants.
In addition, the objects found at Skara Brae and whose function has been interpreted as ritualistic or ceremonial, rather than practical, are taken to be further evidence that the tribe here had time for ceremony. After all, as Dr Clark points out, carving a ceremonial orb out of hard volcanic rock without a metal tool is a very time consuming activity and suggests a society whose time was not taken up wholly by finding food to survive.