Skara Brae: a Stone Age village
History · Key Stage 2 · The School
Older than Stonehenge
SKARA BRAE is a Stone Age village on Orkney. Orkney sits off the north coast of Scotland. People lived there from about 3200 to 2200 BCE. That makes it older than Stonehenge's famous stone circle. It is even older than the Great Pyramid of Egypt.
Furniture built from stone
Orkney has very few trees. Without much wood, the villagers used stone instead. They built dressers, box beds, and storage boxes, all from stone slabs. Stone does not rot away like wood. So this furniture survived perfectly, exactly as it was left.
Buried by sand, revealed by a storm
Over thousands of years, sand dunes slowly buried the whole village. It sat hidden for a very long time. Then a huge storm struck in 1850. It stripped away the grass and sand. Suddenly, the stone walls of ancient houses were visible again.
In each house at Skara Brae, a stone dresser stands directly opposite the doorway. It would have been the very first thing a visitor saw on entering. Archaeologists think it displayed the household's most valued possessions. That is much like ornaments on a mantelpiece today. This piece of furniture is still standing, after five thousand years. It tells us exactly what these people wanted a stranger to notice first.