The Bones of Blomuir

Anderson-Whymark, Hugo

The Bones of Blomuir

Resource type

Lecture

Creator (person)

Anderson-Whymark, Hugo

ORCID

Abstract

Only a few of Orkney’s Neolithic cairns have produced bones of the people from that time, but the number has now increased with an excavation at Blomuir in Holm. And this time many of the bones are not mixed up together but preserved as articulated skeletons. The survival of these skeletons, says joint excavation leader Dr Hugo Anderson-Whymark of the National Museums of Scotland, makes Blomuir “truly exceptional and unique”. He tells the story of the work, and what the finds might mean, and how the discovery came as a surprise, with much of the cairn having been quarried for stone at the end of the 19th century. “But just enough of the monument has survived to demonstrate that it was an exceptional example of Neolithic engineering, comparable to the tombs of Quanterness and Quoyness.”