This study of a royal Norwegian farm on the Shetland island of Papa Stour was inspired by a document of 1299 recording the meeting between a Norwegian royal official and a woman who had accused him of treachery to his royal master.

This book offers a groundbreaking analysis of Neolithic art and architecture in Orkney, focussing upon the incredible collection of hundreds of decorated stones being revealed by the current excavations at the Ness of Brodgar.

The medieval earldoms of Orkney and Caithness were positioned between two worlds, the Norwegian and the Scottish. They were a maritime lordship divided, or united, by the turbulent waters of the Pentland Firth. This unlikely combination of island and mainland territory survived as a single lordship for 600 years, against the odds. Growing out of the Viking maelstrom of the early Middle Ages, it became an established and wealthy principality which dominated northern waters, with a renowned dynasty of earls. Despite their peripheral location these earls were fully in touch with the kingdoms of Norway and Scotland and increasingly subject to the rulers of these kingdoms. How they maintained their independence and how they survived the clash of loyalties are themes explored in this book from the early Viking age to the late medieval era when the powerful feudal Sinclair earls ruled the islands and regained possession of Caithness. This is a story of the time when the Northern Isles of Scotland were part of a different national entity which explains the background to the non-Gaelic culture of this locality, when links across the North Sea were as important as links with the kingdom of Scotland to the south.

The Brough of Birsay was the power-center of the Viking earldom of Orkney and is one of Historic Environment Scotland’s key monuments and visitor attractions on the islands. This publication is the culmination of 60 years of investigations that took place on the site between 1954 and 2014. This new volume incorporates comprehensive accounts of work undertaken by Dr Ralegh Radford and Mr Stewart Cruden between 1954 and 1964, excavations by the Viking and Early Settlement Research Project under the direction of the author on site between 1974 and 1981, a rescue excavation in 1993, a geophysical survey in 2007 and archival research up to 2014. Specialist artefactual and palaeobiological studies of metallurgical material, ogham inscriptions and a gilt-bronze mount of Insular origin are included, together with re-analysis of the radiocarbon dates from all sites in Birsay Bay, and a re-assessment of the architecture and dating of the church and related buildings on the Brough itself. The final two chapters put the Brough, as both a Pictish power-center and the hub of the Viking earldom, in the overall context of Birsay Bay and Viking and late Norse Orkney, and the wider world between the Pictish and late Norse/Medieval periods. As well as being the author’s third and final volume reporting on work for the Birsay Bay Project, this volume completes a trilogy of studies of the Brough itself, alongside Mrs Cecil Curle’s and Prof John Hunter’s earlier monographs.

The Iron Age in Northern Britain examines the impact of the Roman expansion northwards, and the native response to the Roman occupation on both sides of the frontiers. It traces the emergence of historically-recorded communities in the post-Roman period and looks at the clash of cultures between Celts and Romans, Picts and Scots. Northern Britain has too often been seen as peripheral to a 'core' located in south-eastern England. Unlike the Iron Age in southern Britain, the story of which can be conveniently terminated with the Roman conquest, the Iron Age in northern Britain has no such horizon to mark its end. The Roman presence in southern and eastern Scotland was militarily intermittent and left untouched large tracts of Atlantic Scotland for which there is a rich legacy of Iron Age settlement, continuing from the mid-first millennium BC to the period of Norse settlement in the late first millennium AD. Here D.W. Harding shows that northern Britain was not peripheral in the Iron Age: it simply belonged to an Atlantic European mainstream different from southern England and its immediate continental neighbours.

A fully illustrated study of Iron Age round-houses, which explores not just their architectural aspects but more importantly their role in the social, economic and ritual structure of their communities, and their significance as symbols of Iron Age society in the face of Romanization.

The story of Kebister was a constant surprise to archaeologists and has opened a remarkable window on 4000 years of Shetland's past.

One hundred years on from J Romilly Allen and Joseph Anderson's 1903 landmark publication, The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland, twenty six essays explore the current state of knowledge of early medieval sculpture in Scotland. They demonstrate the unique value of this material in contributing to our understanding of the society and people that created it between 1000 to 1500 years ago. Today's approaches and techniques offer new insights, as well as great hope, for what might be learnt from future study of 'familiar' and new material alike. The essays exemplify the ever-diversifying, interdisciplinary approaches that are being taken to the study of early medieval sculpture. Key themes that emerge include: the interdependence of conservation, research and access; the need for a 21st-century inventory of the sculpture; the breadth and value of the wide range of the research tools that now exist; conservation issues, including the politics of how and where sculpture should be protected, and the pressing need to identify priorities for action; and, what is probably the most important development over the last 100 years, the increase in awareness of the range of values and significances that attaches to early medieval sculpture, including appreciation of context.

From the author of the acclaimed Insectopedia, a powerful exploration of loss, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present When Hugh Raffles’s two sisters died suddenly within a few weeks of each other, he reached for rocks, stones, and other seemingly solid objects as anchors in a world unmoored, as ways to make sense of these events through stories far larger than his own. A moving, profound, and affirming meditation, The Book of Unconformities is grounded in stories of stones: Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan’s Lenape, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived with six Inuit adventurers in the exuberant but fractious New York City of 1897. As Raffles follows these fundamental objects, unearthing the events they’ve engendered, he finds them losing their solidity and becoming as capricious, indifferent, and willful as time itself.