East Kirk of St Nicholas dig- January 2008
Assistant Archaeologist, Alison Cameron, writes ...
Happy New Year. Regular readers will realise that this is a rather belated blog, but just after we all emerged from a good festive period, we received quite amazing news.
Visitors to the dig and those hundreds of people who have invited one of the Archaeological Unit staff to talk about the St Nicholas excavation in the last year, will know that we excavated a group of small skeletons which had been buried close to an apse, or circular east end wall of a church that we thought probably dated to the early 12th century. Those who visited the dig saw this wall immediately below the viewing window.
There was no direct dating for this early church or its associated burials – no coins or easily datable pottery were found so we sent off a sample of bone for radiocarbon dating after Paul Duffy in Glasgow had checked the skeleton to make sure all the information was recorded from it. Paul reported that the child died at the age of about two and a half years and there was no sign of disease or cause of death. The burial can be seen in the photo above in the bottom right corner.
The body had been placed in the grave and the head and feet had been supported by stones – a large stone had been placed at each side of the head and feet and a smaller one under the chin. There are many reasons why these stones might have been placed so specifically – was the body laid out in the tiny grave to be viewed by members of the family during a burial ritual?
The following photograph of the burial was taken by me during the excavation – the bones of each skeleton were not drawn on site so the skeletons were photographed digitally by site staff and the outline of the skeletons are now being drawn using these photos. They were not really meant for publication and that’s why you can see the toe of my boot in the bottom right of the next photograph! This photograph also shows that this burial was cut by the earliest rectangular 12th-century church, the wall of which can be seen in the right top of the photo.
Very few of the burials around the apse had been disturbed by later grave digging and this might be because some of them were marked. Below are two pictures. The first one shows two upright stones near a group of baby burials which may have been used as grave markers. There were very few upright stones like this found in other areas of the dig as stones usually fall into a recumbent position. The following photo shows a layer of mussel shells: you can see that they have been cut by a wall (top) and by a later burial (right) and we did not realise that the shells covered a burial until we had dug below them and found the baby burials.
And so for the big news. The date for the burial is 890-1020 AD – the late 9th century to the early 11th-century AD – most likely in the middle of this date range – the 10th century.
We were all astounded and when I contacted medieval church specialist, Professor Richard Fawcett (below, during the dig looking at some of the architectural stones from the dig) he started his reply to us with ‘How extraordinary!’. With the help of Richard and many other specialists, we will, over the next few months, piece together timeline of this amazing excavation. We will, of course, be getting further dates and we will let you know when these come through.
Finally….news of future work at St Nicholas Church. Some of you will remember my colleague Carmen Cuenca-Garcia (below right with Human Skeletal Remains student, Aidan Mulkerrin) who was one of the very experienced field archaeologists who worked on the excavation. She left us last summer and is now doing a post-graduate course at Bradford University in Geophysical Prospection. Carmen is thinking of doing a ground penetrating radar (GPR) survey of St Nicholas Church for her thesis. She came up just before Christmas and did some trial work with GPR equipment which she used in Drum’s Aisle and the West Kirk to ‘see’ under the floors of the church. The results are hopeful and in the next few months she should be returning here to carry out a full survey. We’ll let you know what she finds.
