The Neolithic era marks the beginning of plant cultivation and animal husbandry. In Britain, the Neolithic farmers seemed to have arrived on the island sometime before 4000 BCE. Using stone axes, they cleared the forests for their fields. One of the characteristics of the British Neolithic is the construction of chambered cairns and passage graves. One of the finest examples of a Neolithic passage grave in Scotland is Maes Howe.
About 2800 BCE, the Neolithic farmers on Mainland, Orkney Islands built Maes Howe on a flat plain near the southeast end of the Loch of Harray. The mound is about 116 feet (35 meters) in diameter. The mound is surrounded by a ditch which is up to 45 feet (15 meters) wide. The ditch is from 50 to 70 feet (14 to 21 meters) from the mound.
An entrance passage is 36 feet (11 meters) long and leads to a central tomb which is almost square. The tomb has a superbly constructed corbelled vault which rose to a height of nearly 16 feet (five meters) above the floor. Several small burial chambers were off of this chamber. The central tomb chamber measures about 15 feet (4.6 meters) on each side.
Shown above is a drawing of the central chamber as it appeared when it was uncovered in the nineteenth century.
The beehive-shaped vault was constructed using large, flat stone slabs, many of which traverse almost the entire length of the walls. At about three feet from the flow, the construction changes from the use of the flat slabs, to overlapping slabs which form the corbelling of the vault. In each corner of the chamber there were huge angled buttresses that rise up to the top of the vault.
Shown above is the entrance to Maes Howe. The entrance passage is only about 3 feet (slightly less than one meter) high. This means that people who visited the tomb had to stoop or crawl into the central chamber.
The tomb is aligned so that the rear wall of the central chamber is illuminated by the winter solstice. This is one of the architectural features of Maes Howe that is similar to Newgrange in Ireland. Some people feel that these two tombs were designed by the same people.
The slabs of stone used to construct Maes Howe were carefully leveled and plumbed. In some instances small slivers of stone were used to underpin megaliths that were not lying true.
It is estimated that it took the Neolithic farmers of Orkney about 39,000 worker hours to construct Maes Howe (although at least one archaeologist has calculated that it took more than 100,000 hours).
The people who lived around Maes Howe when it was built were subsisting with a mixed agricultural economy. In addition to cereal crops, cattle appear to have been an important part of their subsistence. This suggests that they were descendants of the Homo sapiens population in Turkey about 8,000 years ago when there was a genetic mutation that allowed adults to consume milk.
The people who built Maes Howe were using a distinctive type of pottery which is called grooved ware by archaeologists. This is a type of pottery which was found throughout the British Isles about 3000 BCE. Grooved ware, which is not found in continental Europe, seems to have originated in Orkney and then diffused throughout Britain and Ireland. Grooved ware is usually a flat-bottomed pot with straight sides that slope outwards. There are grooved decorations around the top. Some of them have complex geometric decorations. Some archaeologists feel that the grooved ware style was derived from earlier wicker basketry forms. Some archaeologists feel that grooved ware may have had ritual purposes as they are frequently found at ceremonial sites. In addition, some of the pots appear to have held black henbane, a powerful hallucinogen.
Maes Howe is not an isolated site. There was a Neolithic road which connected the tomb to the village of Skara Brae as well as to the Standing Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar.