The Ness of Brodgar

Orkney is one of the few places where any knobbed balls have been found in situ. None of the theories of what they were used for has been very persuasive, but they have been found many places in northern Scotland. One was found at the Ness of Brodgar in 2013, and a new one at this summer's dig. This Ness was a community structure between the major standing stones sites, containing houses, cooking areas, and workshops. It was only discovered in 2003 and usual, accidentally by a farmer plowing his field. Though it doesn't make for good tourist photographs, it is much more extensive than the stone circles themselves and tells us more about how the people lived.

A funny thing about experts.  We had international experts, even the decades-long chief archaeologists on some sites.  Because of this story I will not mention any names, though anyone determined could narrow it down to a few persons pretty quickly if they chose. In explaining about the Ness, our guide had a mind-numbing amount of detail at his fingertips and ability to offhandedly point things out that would only be noticed by people who had spent a lot of time at this.  Occasionally there would be another archaeologist in the group and they would talk shop in a manner that was almost incomprehensible. Sometimes they would double back and explain something to the rest of us, sometimes not. In summing up before the Q&A our guide mentioned that there was now some assurance that the very top layer before the site was abandoned not only had some artefacts from the Beaker People, but good evidence that they had used an inhabited the site.

I fancy there were murmurs of appreciation of this, but it may have been only me.  This is the moment of transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age.  The Bell Beaker culture was the group that almost fully replaced the previous culture - the one that had actually built Stonehenge, Avebury, Newgrange, and the stone rings around us but were overwhelmed throughout Europe by the Indo-Europeans, the Yamnaya, the wildly violent Steppe tribes who were our ancestors. In most places the male lineages were completely replaced.  Orkney and eastern Scandinavia were two of the few places where that replacement occurred differently or not at all. That's another story, but the short version is that the incoming paternal lines did not replace the Orkney natives, while both groups of females persisted. As this occurred at the far end of their spread, where horses and carts were not the advantage on islands they had been previously, the resident males could mostly hold off the invaders. 

"Ah, this is the part I'm most interested in," I blurted, barely raising my hand to be called on. "The Beaker usually brought the practice of burial in mounds with them, but mound graves were already in place here.  Were they brought at an earlier date by a variation of these people from the Steppes? Are they influenced by Kurgans or completely unrelated?"

"What are kurgans?"

It was as if a mathematicians had said "Who is this Fourier chap you keep talking about?' or an astronomer had said "What do you mean, moons of Neptune?" I was almost too embarrassed to continue, suddenly worried that it was I who had been inhabiting some obscure backwater and thinking it important.  I was able to explain that they were the burial mounds of the Steppe people. He said briefly and generally that the Steppe people had been the Indo-Europeans and "come into" Europe, a rather mild description for complete replacement.  He didn't comment on the any relationship between the two types of mound, and I just dropped it.

All I can think is that the field is so specialised that the experts do not need or desire to keep up with the larger movements in their own area of study. It seems rather like economics, where Nobel winners sometimes seem to have no better grasp on larger issues than other educated people.

So I'm going to say, no, no relation, because if there were he would have been all over it, as obsessed as he was by Orkney information.