iously recovered human remains—mainly teeth—from the site, the hair represents a unique opportunity to learn more about the lifestyle and health of the broch’s inhabitants. As Richard Gray wrote for the Telegraph while reporting on the discovery of 200,000-year-old hair back in 2009, soft tissue such as hair, skin and muscle typically doesn’t survive longer than a few hundred years.
In 2015, Kelly Knudson, an associate professor at Arizona State University who analyzed 2,000-year-old hair found on Peruvian mummies, further explained to New Historian’s Adam Steedman Thake that “we can use hair to look at diet because, quite simply, we are what we eat. By looking at how far the hair is from the scalp, we were able to look at what they were eating in particular weeks or months before they died.”
The Cairns archaeologists’ other significant find, the 2,000-year-old wooden bowl, is the oldest of its kind found in Orkney thus far. According to the Independent’s Chiara Giordano, the team has dubbed the bowl the “Cairns Cog” in honor of the region’s traditional wedding cog, an alcoholic drink passed around in a wooden vessel at marriage receptions.
“In appearance, the bowl is similar in shape to certain of the pottery vessels of the period, and in particular it looks like the sort of vessel we suspect to have been used for serving food or drink,” Carruthers explains in a statement. “Its round base makes you think that it would have been required to be constantly held when full, and perhaps used socially, passed around from hand to hand, person to person.”
The alderwood bowl measures nearly 12 inches across and features an outward-facing rim, globular body and rounded base. Although the bowl split at some point in its millenia-long history, it remained held together by the subterranean chamber’s muddy silts.
In addition to the bowl and hair, UHI archaeologists discovered an array of ancient artifacts at the Cairns site, from pieces of wood that mirror modern-day tent pegs to preserved plant fibers likely woven by human hands and a glass bead.
“There is still much work to do in The Well, and there are other amazing remains to be recovered from the silts there, as well as across the site,” the UHI blog states. “The excavations are ongoing and more waterlogged items are likely to be raised during that time. The next steps will be to conserve and assess the objects.”