Gavin Morgan

28 May 2008

A LITTLE known archaeological project to uncover why, when and how a thriving Shetland township was completely buried by rising sands has just packed up for another year.

The township of Broo, located at the south end of Shetland Mainland, was one of the largest and most important in Shetland before it was decimated sometime between the mid 17th and early 18th century.

The multilayered undertaking, known as the Shetland Islands Climate and Settlement project, is using many different disciplines to find out specific details about this environmental disaster.

These range from archaeology to geology to sediment core studies from lochs as well as historical research in Shetland Museum and Archives.

The area now known as Quendale Links was first surveyed by researchers including Dr Gerry Bigelow from Bates College, Lewiston, Maine USA in 1997, then later in 2002.

It was during the latter visit that they became aware of a “well preserved” farm building buried under two metres of sand, about “two kilometres from Quendale beach”.

It is this excavation that is now the focal point of the project and has just finished its sixth season with Dr Bigelow leading a 13 strong team including 10 students from Bates.

The American funded project is sponsored by Bates College, the University of Southern Maine and, in the 2005 season, the US National Science Foundation through its Artic Social Sciences programme.

Dr Bigelow said: “This project is part of an environmental history project using archaeology as a tool to help us learn about what was happening in the landscape.

“It is also a straight archaeology project in that we are interested in what it was like for the people who were living in Broo as the township was progressively engulfed in the moving sands.”

“Before this work started we knew that the township of Broo was certainly lost before the mid 1700’s when there were some very graphic accounts of its full destruction at that point.”

Theories abound about the cause of the disaster including the “little ice age” when great storms were quite common, intensive farming or the introduction of rabbits.

“We wanted to find out the dates and chronology of the whole process and get a sense of whether it might be related to the little ice age or more to changing land use like very intensive cultivation or even rabbits really burrowing into the dune systems, making them more susceptible to high winds.”

The farm building was believed to have belonged to the “fairly high status” Sinclair family, but the site was probably not their original home.

Dr Bigelow thinks that their first farm was moved from closer to the sea during the course of the sand rising and they carried on living in the second area even as the beach continued to advance rapidly around them.

“It is quite dramatic, and it is possible that it may have been buried in just the course of a few years and the people finally left after over a metre of mixed sand and their farm refuse had accumulated around the walls of the house.

“It must have been a terrible struggle. If you can imagine a house in which the ground surface has risen over a metre. They actually had to build little sets of stairs to climb out of the rooms in the building we have excavated.

“This building is probably not the main house, judging by its feature it was probably some kind of subsidiary stable or storehouse, but people did live in it in the last phase,” he said.

Dating of the exact time that the family was forced to leave is variable, but Dr Bigelow and his team are using different methods to arrive at a more accurate date.

“We have a kind of scientific dating called Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating. It tells you when a layer has been buried and excluded from light and we have a very nice set of dates that run from 1670 to 1712 from that method.

“We also have some artefacts that were made in a relatively short time period that appear to be from about 1690 to 1715,” He said.

Evidence that points to the Sinclair family’s high standing before the disaster includes the discovery of artefacts such as window glass and shards from a slate roof, but probably not off the building being worked on.

“We have not found that many artefacts, and they are quite fragmentary, but they fit the time period that other dating evidence suggests, very well.

“They also fit the idea that these people were originally well off. By the time the catastrophe was over though, they were virtually bankrupt,” Dr Bigelow said.

OSL dating has also been used extensively at the Old Scatness Broch excavations, an archaeological project that has received significantly more publicity than the Broo dig.

Dr Bigelow and his team will be returning to the site again next year and the long term aim is to make the public more aware of the site and its historical importance by encouraging visitors.

“Some details would have to be worked out with the landowners and so on. It is an unusual opportunity because there are a significant number of standing 17th century buildings in Shetland, but most of them are castles and forts,” Dr Bigelow said.