Orkney today is an archipelago off the northeast coast of Scotland. The first inhabitants arrived at the end of the last Ice Age about 9,000 years ago. At this time, Orkney was not an archipelago, but a single large island. The first inhabitants were Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) hunter-gatherers who lived in small nomadic bands.
The designation Mesolithic refers to the era from the end of the ice age to agriculture. This is a time when the people subsisted by hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants. It should not, however, be assumed that this lifestyle centered on random migration: the people moved from resource area to resource area according to a schedule. They had to be able to move into an area at a time when the resources were available.
While Orkney today looks treeless and windswept, 9,000 years ago it was very different. In her book Monuments of Orkney: A Visitor’s Guide, Caroline Wickham-Jones writes:
“Research indicates that woodland was commonplace at the time of the earliest inhabitants of Orkney. The early landscape included open grassland as well as trees; there was hazel, birch and willow, and heath lands on the higher hills and moors.”
With regard to the origins of the early Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, Caroline Wickham-Jones writes:
“It is likely that the first inhabitants of Orkney were displaced peoples, the descendants of those who, at the height of the last Ice Age, had inhabited Doggerland (a landmass on the site of what is now the North Sea).”
At the end of the last Ice Age, rising sea levels caused by the melting ice began to inundate Doggerland, making it too wet for animals and the humans who hunted them. This period of time, which began at about 8000 BCE, was a period in which the temperature was rising. Lesley Adkins and Roy A. Adkins, in their A Thesaurus of British Archaeology, report:
“This improvement was gradual, and probably not constant, and its indirect effects on man were much more significant than the improvement in the climate itself—the earlier melting of the glaciers causing a rise in sea level which eventually led to the separation of Britain from the Continent at the mid seventh millennium BC.”
The earliest people in Orkney exploited the island’s abundant marine resources which meant that they often camped on or near the island’s beaches. Unfortunately for today’s archaeologists, this means that the rising sea levels from the melting ice cap has covered these earliest sites. Caroline Wickham-Jones writes:
“In Orkney the archaeological invisibility of the Mesolithic has been compounded by the rise in sea levels and the submergence of the coastal lands where they tended to settle and roam.”
In general, the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers lived in small bands which moved about in a particular territory, utilizing the various resources—plants, animals, stones—available in the territory. Their camp sites were occupied only intermittently. It is generally assumed that these small bands were not isolated from one another, but did interact. The people would gather in larger groups at certain times of the year—some writers have suggested that these meetings would be timed to correspond with solstices and equinoxes—where they could exchange information, obtain spouses, trade material goods, and even change their band affiliation.
While Orkney is an island, they did have contact with Scotland by watercraft—either dugout canoes or skin-covered boats.