South Uist and the other islands of the Outer Hebrides are unusually rich in archaeological remains. Since the late 1980s a major multidisciplinary project, led by the Universities of Sheffield, Cardiff, and Bournemouth, has investigated island life from prehistory to the present. With 14 research volumes now published, our second and final volume on Cladh Hallan brings together the findings from this remarkable site (see ‘Further information’ below). Preserved in the calcareous machair sand of South Uist’s west coast, Cladh Hallan’s deep stratigraphic sequence has provided layer on layer of intact house floors and walls, middens, and yard surfaces, allowing us to reconstruct how human activity on the site evolved over many centuries.
Our first Cladh Hallan volume, published in 2021 (see CA 382), explored the long-term sequence of the site from its Beaker-period beginnings as a ploughed field 4,000 years ago to the eventual abandonment of an Iron Age settlement around 500 BC. In the centuries in between, this location served first as an Early to Middle Bronze Age cemetery and then as a Middle to Late Bronze Age settlement that was reorganised as a row of roundhouses in the 11th century BC. It is the site’s exceptionally rich assemblage of artefacts and environmental remains that forms the focus of our second volume, including metalwork of bronze, gold, and iron; bronze-casting debris; ceramics; tools of bone, antler, stone, and flint; pendants, rings, bangles, and beads; the bones of land and sea mammals, fish, birds, and humans; and even coprolites. Complementing these diverse finds, scientific analyses of land snails, carbonised plant remains, isotopes of human and animal bones, animal DNA, and bone histology all provide further insights into life and death within this once-thriving prehistoric community.
From fields to burial ground to settlement
Neolithic land surfaces on the islands’ west coast were already deeply buried under encroaching sand when Beaker-using farmers laid out their fields and settlements on the machair around 2200 BC. Cladh Hallan is one of three such sites discovered on South Uist, and cross-ploughed ard-marks and carbonised plant remains reveal that they grew barley, the staple cereal crop of the Uists ever after. After the 19th century BC, however, Cladh Hallan’s fields were used as a burial ground, with evidence for funerary pyres and cremation burials.
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