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Two polished stone balls shaped about 5,500 years ago – linked to a mysterious practice almost unique to Neolithic Britain – have been discovered in an ancient tomb on the island of Sanday, in the Orkney Islands north of mainland Scotland. Hundreds of similar stone balls, each about the size of a baseball, have been found at Neolithic sites mainly in Scotland and the Orkney Islands, but also in England, Ireland, and Norway, Live Science previously reported. Some are ornately carved – such as the famous Towie ball discovered in northeast Scotland in 1860 – but others are studded with...

...the research team extracted and analysed DNA from the remains of 442 men, women and children... from archaeological sites in Scandinavia, the U.K., Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, Estonia, Ukraine, Poland and Russia, and mostly date to the Viking Age (ca. 750-1050 AD). The team's analyses yielded a number of findings. One of the most noteworthy is that contrary to what has often been assumed, Viking identity was not limited to people of Scandinavian ancestry -- the team discovered that two skeletons from a Viking burial site in the Orkney Islands were of Scottish ancestry. They also found evidence that there was...

Stonehenge builders' houses found The village would have housed hundreds of people (Image: National Geographic) Archaeologists say they have found a huge ancient settlement used by the people who built Stonehenge. Excavations at Durrington Walls, near the legendary Salisbury Plain monument, uncovered remains of ancient houses. People seem to have occupied the sites seasonally, using them for ritual feasting and funeral ceremonies. In ancient times, this settlement would have housed hundreds of people, making it the largest Neolithic village ever found in Britain. The dwellings date back to 2,600-2,500 BC, the same period that Stonehenge was built. "In what were...

[T]he 4,000-year-old standing stones of the Ring of Brogar -- a UNESCO World Heritage Site -- are startling. Thirty-six of the original 60 stones remain, in a perfect circle, each up to 13 feet tall, surrounded by a deep ditch cut into the rock. At dawn and dusk, the stones stand dark and imposing against the light reflecting off the Loch of Stenness below. Farther along is the biggest tourist attraction on Orkney, the village of Skara Brae, protected under the sand for nearly 5,000 years until it was revealed by a huge storm in 1850. Each of the stone...

The site, known as the Ness of Brodgar, was investigated by BBC2 documentary A History of Ancient Britain, with presenter Neil Oliver describing it as 'the discovery of a lifetime'. So far the remains of 14 Stone Age buildings have been excavated, but thermal geophysics technology has revealed that there are 100 altogether, forming a kind of temple precinct. Until now Stonehenge was considered to have been the centre of Neolithic culture, but that title may now go to the Orkney site, which contains Britain's earliest known wall paintings. Oliver said: 'The excavation of a vast network of buildings on...

Was Orkney the ceremonial capital of ancient Britain? STEPHEN STEWART November 03 2003 ORKNEY may have been the largest prehistoric settlement or ceremonial site in Britain, new research reveals today. Archaeologists using the latest techniques to map under the soil discovered the world heritage site covering the Ness of Brodgar in Stenness, was a massive centre of activity in Stone Age times. Orkney's landscape has largely managed to avoid the rigours of industrialised farming and may yet yield its secrets about the recently-surveyed site, which in terms of scale, puts the likes of Stonehenge, Avebury and Skara Brae in the...

Buried deep beneath the sediment of the North Atlantic Ocean lies an ancient, lost landscape with furrows cut by rivers and peaks that once belonged to mountains. Geologists recently discovered this roughly 56-million-year-old landscape using data gathered for oil companies. "It looks for all the world like a map of a bit of a country onshore," said Nicky White, the senior researcher. "It is like an ancient fossil landscape preserved 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) beneath the seabed." So far, the data have revealed a landscape about 3,861 square miles (10,000 square km) west of the Orkney-Shetland Islands that stretched above...

Celebrated British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, a former Master of the Queen's Music, has died at the age of 81. He was known for his modern and avant-garde works, but his most famous piece was a simple, haunting lament for solo piano - Farewell To Stromness. "He was, right to the end, a pioneer," Stephen Lumsden, Managing Director of music agency Intermusica, said. The Salford-born musician, who had leukaemia, died at home in Orkney.

Mysteries come in many forms: ancient, modern, unsolved, and unexplained. But the world's most mysterious buildings are a physical force to be reckoned with. They've become popularized on websites full of user-generated and editor-curated like Abandoned-places.com, weburbanist.com, and AtlasObscura.com, an exhaustive database of the unusual. "In an age where it sometimes seems like there's nothing left to discover, our site is for people who still believe in exploration," says AtlasObscura.com cofounder Joshua Foer. Our definition of mysterious is broad and varied. Some buildings on our list are being eaten alive by the earth, such as a lava-buried church in the...

Footsteps from the past: the ancient village of Skara Brae CAROLINE WICKHAM-JONES SCOTLAND'S towns and settlements are proud of their roots, but few can boast the antiquity of Skara Brae on the Orkney Islands. Originally built around 3100BC to house a small group of Neolithic farming families, the abandoned houses with their stone dressers, beds and hearths provide a remarkable glimpse of a lifestyle that has long disappeared. Of course the village developed slowly, as any village today, but Skara Brae is notable for the quality of its remains. The historic site still provides a powerful message, even for the...

Archaeologists on Orkney are investigating what is thought to be a 5,000-year-old tomb complex. A local man stumbled on the site while using a mechanical digger for landscaping. It appears to contain a central passageway and multiple chambers excavated from rock. There is a large neolithic burial complex nearby called The Tomb of the Eagles where over 300 bodies were found. "Potentially these skeletons could tell us so much about Neolithic people," said Orkney Islands Council archaeologist Julie Gibson. "Not only in relation to their deaths, but their lives."