Five centuries of domestic debris sampled at millimetre scale

October 10, 2026United KingdomExcavationShare

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Key facts

• House floors at Cladh Hallan preserve about five centuries of domestic traces from the Later Bronze Age into the Iron Age
• Houses were cut down into the sand; the central house measured 10 m by 8.5 m inside and was cut a full metre down to the old Beaker cultivated soil
• The central house had an east-facing entrance with a sloping ramp later lengthened by a small round porch, a central fireplace, a raised turf sleeping bench, water containers and a sunken storage space
• The South Uist team used 100% sampling with flotation on a half-metre grid combined with geochemical and magnetic sampling and soil micromorphology
• Sieve sizes went down to one millimetre; finds included pottery, butchered mammal bone, shell, carbonised grain, copper, pumice, stone, bone, antler, flint, quartz, fired clay and bronze
• A repeated pattern held: cooking vessels grouped south-east of the fire, bone/stone/pumice/flint implements south-west, and animal bone in a crescent west of the fire where people sat to eat
• A small iron strip found in the north-east area of the central house is among the earliest iron objects in the British Bronze Age, possibly from a bracelet
• Two small bronze blades lay on the surface above the child's burial as a possible closing deposit, and ash there gave the highest density of barley grains in the house, interpreted by excavators as a burnt offering from a small shrine

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