At Isbister, on South Ronaldsay, is the privately owned Tomb of the Eagles.
The landowner, Mr R Simison (a local farmer), tried for twenty years (as the family will delight in telling you in the museum that they run within their farmhouse) to get the tomb excavated. Eventually the "experts" decided that the tomb was not of sufficient interest and Mr Simison was allowed to excavate the tomb himself.
This uninteresting monument was found to hold the remains of three-hundred and forty people, many animal remains, and Neolithic artifacts.
Amongst the animal remains were the carcasses of at least ten white-tailed sea eagles, hence the name of the tomb.
The large number of human remains make it possible to draw some sensible conclusions about Neolithic people in the area.
The mixture of bones in the tomb indicate that there was no priviledged part of the population who were entitled to burial in the tomb. The ages of the individuals were:
| 24 skeletons | |
| 70 skeletons | |
| 63 skeletons | |
| 185 skeletons |
On the same farm is the site of an Bronze Age house, with cooking pot (a stone-lined pit which could be filled with water and heated with stones taken from the fire, into which food to be cooked could be placed - outside the house was found a large pile of heat-cracked stones which would have been used for this purpose), running water and drains (water was directed through a stone channel in the floor of the house).
To the map of Orkney.