Archaeology is not only important for understanding our roots and our relationships, but also lies at the heart of our tourist industry. Tourism now is worth a third of Orkney’s economy, and in independent surveys archaeology is the most common reason given for visiting.

 

Sea levels in Orkney have been rising since the last Ice Age, when com-pared to the land. This means con-tinuous loss of land and therefore archaeological sites, to the sea. The

precise sea-level changes are not yet clearly mapped, but this is an observable process, which may be speeding up. Many of Orkney’s archaeological sites are located on the coastal fringes of the islands because people have been reliant on both sea and land since they first came here some 6,000 years ago. Very few of these sites are excavated

or explained to visitors.

 

The types of site being gradually taken away by the sea range from funereal (chambered

cairns and burial cists, cemeteries) to domestic and agricultural e.g. 6,000 year old farm settlements, with their buried soils and visible plough marks. Other examples include monks’ hermitages on cliff stacks; Viking farms; Iron Age tower houses called brochs; cemeteries from the later Iron Age and so on.