ng an intact roof and stone-cut steps leading down into the heart of the chamber, which is filled with muddy silt. The chamber appears to have been sealed in an anaerobic state, or without oxygen, meaning that bacteria were unable to damage the items.
Given that the chamber was sealed around the same time the broch was abandoned, the archaeologists believe their finds date to the later 1st through mid-2nd century A.D.; however, they plan on conducting radiocarbon dating tests to determine if the items are even older than estimated.
Martin Carruthers, UHI lecturer and excavation director, tells Campsie that the team unearthed about 20 strands of hair, with more likely hidden in muddy soil samples still to be analyzed.
“It looks like human hair,” Carruthers says. “It is pliable, if you blow on it, it moves. It is shiny, dark and measures around [three to four inches] long, so potentially it records eight to 10 months of information about diet and the conditions people were living in.”
Although the team has previously 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 “Cai