A Plethora of Pivot Stones

Back on site today after losing yesterday to Storm Floris, still windy with intermittent heavy squalls making everyone feel a bit exhausted by the end of the day. It's our last week so frantic last minute digging and recording alongside starting to cover the site for the winter. We have three Star Finds today, which we have known about for a while but have only just been lifted ahead of the backfilling, these splendid pivot stones:

These are for the Iron Age door to swing in, and as such are pretty common in Orcadian archaeology, but two of them have pivots on two of their sides, instead of the more usual one pivot and blank faces elsewhere. Below is the same stone as above but showing both worked faces:

And here's the other two pivot stone, with a large and small socket this time:

And a close up of the second face:

Presumably one pivot hole got worn to such an extent that they had to lift the stone and cut a new hole for the door and then reset it, a fair bit of work but shows how long the building remained in use maybe?

Finally we have this more usual version with just the single pivot hole, but still a big chunky block no doubt to take a big chunky door:

The beach below site was piled up high with kelp from the storm, being admired here by John, Matt and Michel, three of our willing volunteers, in a break from their wet sieving:

Meanwhile Aidan was hard at it secured in one the trailers sorting and identifying animal bone from this season, he's away home on tomorrow night's boat:

Lindsey meantime was working on the underground structure in the entrance passageway, difficult to get good photos due to the depth and shadows:

Seems to have been wider and then narrowed, and extends for some distance below the main entrance passageway:

We are now officially closed to visitors as we have to get going with the backfilling to protect the site when we leave, thank you to all who have made the effort to visit us over the season, and thank you to all our loyal dig diary readers - you know who you are!