5.3 Settlement

Our understanding of the nature, organisation and duration of Neolithic settlement in the Highland Region is hindered by the paucity of the available information and its geographical imbalance, with Inverness and the surrounding area having produced most of the data. Virtually nothing is known about Neolithic settlement in large parts of the Highland Region, including Skye, and until remains are found or searched for, any comments must remain provisional. Table 5.1 lists the sites in the Region that have produced radiocarbon-dated evidence relating to settlement activities.

Most of the information on Neolithic settlement comes from developer-funded excavations, and in most cases it relates to pits and occasional post-holes, which constitute the final surviving remains if the Neolithic ground surface has been ploughed away. There are precious few structures that can be described as houses; these are discussed in 5.3.3.

There is no excavated example of an early Neolithic timber ‘hall’ in the Highland Region. These timber halls would have been extraordinarily large houses that would have been occupied communally by pioneering farming groups when they first arrived in an area (Sheridan 2013). Canmore and the Highland HER however record ‘timber halls’ identified from aerial photographs at Balmachree, Inverness-shire (Canmore 14239 and 14241; MHG3023, MHG2944). It would be worth undertaking exploratory excavation to determine whether these may be of Neolithic date, rather than dating to the 1st millennium AD as is generally assumed. Note, however, that one rectangular structure at Balmachree (MHG2944) is identified from aerial photographs as having signs of ‘4 or 5 rectangular structures with sunken floors’. If these are genuinely sunken-floored structures, then this does suggests a 1st millennium AD, rather than an Early Neolithic date, for this ensemble of structures.

The nature of the occupation of sandhills sites such as Littleferry, which would have been an island during the fourth millennium, needs to be investigated. Bradley (et al 2017) has argued that Littleferry, with its extraordinary concentration of Neolithic artefactual finds (mostly lithics), may have served as a coastal haven where those travelling at sea would meet (Case Study Littleferry Links). This arguement however, still leaves open the question of whether people were living seasonally or year-round at these coastal locations, or were simply visiting them. As for whether any shell middens in the Highland Region were exploited during the Neolithic period, and whether they relate to settlement patterns, this is another question that deserves attention.

Isolated lithic scatters and other ‘stray’ finds of Neolithic artefacts such as axeheads are another potential indicator of settlement; these finds tend to reinforce and extend the distribution pattern shown by funerary monuments and excavated sites. In order to determine whether lithic scatters constitute evidence for permanent, seasonal or temporary occupation, targeted excavation would be necessary. In many cases – as with the finds from the Scotland’s First Settlers project in the west (Hardy and Wickham-Jones 2009; Case Study Scotland’s First Settlers Project) and from the Tarradale fieldwork project (Ballin forthcoming), lithic scatters tend to be palimpsests relating to activities undertaken at various periods in prehistory, and they require careful chronological disentangling (see Ballin forthcoming). Elsewhere, only small areas of sites have been investigated, and more extensive excavations are required to obtain a clearer sense of the nature of activities. At Uamh Mhór, Cove, a site that probably lay on a Neolithic beach and may have been a short-term camp site, a small assemblage of flaked local quartz and a hammerstone and pounder of quartzite were found in a deposit of sandy silt with charcoal lenses (Piper et al 2019; Piper forthcoming). This evidence suggests that activities may have included cooking; a sample of alder charcoal has produced a radiocarbon date of 3794–3655 cal BC (Stephanie Piper pers comm). This deposit lay underneath a Chalcolithic or Early Bronze Age burnt mound.

Predictive modelling of likely settlement areas, based on the current understanding of the landscapes favoured by Neolithic farmers elsewhere in Scotland (see Dingwall et al 2019 for ‘fertile’ areas in Aberdeenshire) and targeting areas of colluvium that could be concealing well-preserved remains, will go some way to redressing the enormous gaps in our knowledge. Chance finds will, however, still be important in alerting attention to less obvious areas where people lived.

While some commentators on Neolithic Britain (eg Stevens and Fuller 2012) have argued for a shift from an Early Neolithic pattern of sedentary, year-round settlement to nomadic pastoralism some time around 3500 BC, associated with a putative collapse in cereal agriculture, this ’boom and bust’ model (Shennan 2018) has been robustly critiqued by Bishop (2015) and it finds no support in the Highland Region where, ironically, most of the surviving evidence for houses dates to the Middle and Late Neolithic.