(i.e. post-Viking Age) longhouse architecture of North Atlantic type associated with
portable material culture imported from Norway or influenced by Scandinavian styles.
These settlements show little or no affinity with local pre-Viking Age precursors.
In Shetland they include Underhoull (Small 1966 ; Stummann Hansen 2000 : 89 ),
Sandwick North (Stummann Hansen 2000 ), Sandwick (Bigelow 1987 ) and the later
phases of Jarlshof (Hamilton 1956 ). In Orkney, they are Tuquoy (Owen 1993 , 2005 ),
Quoygrew (Barrett 2005 ; Barrett et al. 2005 ; see below), Beachview (Morris 1996 a), and
the later phases of Pool (Hunter et al. 1993 ), Skaill Deerness (Buteux 1997 ) and the
Brough of Birsay (Curle 1982 ; Hunter 1986 ; Morris 1996 a).
To elaborate on one example, Phase 2 at Quoygrew included a modest ‘fisherman’s
house’ of eleventh–twelfth-century date with unambiguous Scandinavian associations
(Figure 30. 2 ). It was between 7 m and 10 m long (its western end remains under the
wall of a consolidated later building) and 4 m wide internally with low side aisles or
‘benches’ flanking each wall. The long walls and eastern gable, all slightly bowed, were
composed of a dry-stone inner face and an informal outer face suggestive of mixed stone
and turf construction. The portable material culture in this house was remarkable given
its ‘Scottish’ location. It included hones of Eidsborg schist from Norway (G. Gaunt pers.
comm.), shards of hemispherical soapstone vessels probably from Norway (C. Batey pers.
comm.), a broken whalebone weaving batten of Norwegian type and several antler
combs of types made in Norwegian towns at this date (e.g. Flodin 1989 ; S. Ashby pers.
comm.). The house contained only a single shard of coarse pottery, the most ubiquitous
find in pre-Viking Age indigenous settlements (e.g. Ross 1994 ) and in eleventh–
twelfth-century sites in mainland Scotland (e.g. Hall 2001 ). The fishing associations of
the building are made clear by an extensive fish midden that surrounds it (Barrett 2005 ;
Simpson et al. 2005 ) and finds of a fishhook and probable boat anchor.
The story of medieval settlement in western Scotland is slightly more complex.
Tenth- and eleventh-century longhouses with bowed walls and Scandinavian material
culture have recently been excavated at Bornish on South Uist (Sharples 2004 ). However,
other buildings of slightly later date at Bornish and Cille Pheadair (also on South Uist)
seem to have developed as a distinctive regional tradition (Sharples and Parker Pearson
1999 ; Parker Pearson et al. 2004 b). Moreover, ceramics continued to be used in the
Outer Hebrides throughout the Viking Age and Middle Ages, albeit in different styles
from their pre-Viking predecessors (Lane 1990 ; Campbell 2002 ). Yet further south,
settlement of demonstrably Scandinavian style of any date in Argyll has not yet been
found (e.g. Brown 1997 ). It must be noted, however, that there may have been some
Scandinavian influence on the royal dynasty of Strathclyde in the tenth and eleventh
centuries based on the hogback monuments known from the kingdom’s ecclesiastical
centre at Govan (Driscoll 1998 ).
Late Viking Age and medieval settlements from the Northern Isles may thus imply
that Shetlandic and Orcadian society was explicitly ‘Norse’ in the tenth to twelfth
centuries – insofar as material culture is related to identity ( Jones 1997 ; Barrett 2003 ).
Quoygrew and other sites like it are particularly noteworthy because they demonstrate
that this observation holds true for individuals of modest or even low status in addition
to the elite for whom manuscript sources were probably produced. In the Western Isles
and mainland Argyll the situation may have been more complex. Here, however, one is
assisted by a better record in the contemporary Irish historical sources which imply
much involvement in the increasingly Hiberno-Norse world of the Irish Sea province to
–– chapter 30 : The Norse in Scotland––