Carved Stone Balls are some of the most enigmatic artefacts that we have in Scottish prehistory.
There used to be a lot of debate about how old they were - some people thought they were
Bronze Age, many people thought they were Iron Age and some people even thought they
were early Christian.
But it was only with Radiocarbon Dating of sites like Skara Brae that we realised that
these were in fact Neolithic objects.
To make a Carved Stone Ball you don't need very many techniques and they are techniques
that most Neolithic stone workers would be very familiar with.
Sort of pecking and grinding.
But the actual process requires quite a few stages to go through.
At the start you have to take a raw lump of material - it might be a beach cobble, it
might be a lump of raw rock - and peck that into a sphere.
One of the biggest mysteries around Carved Stone Balls is what they were actually used
for.
Over the last 200 years there have been almost as many theories about how they were used
as there are Carved Stone Balls.
Were they used for divination?
Were they part of a game?
Some people have suggested weights, but that theory didn't hold much water because they
weigh a huge range of different weights.
More recently we've seen all sorts of suggestions that they somehow relate to mathematics, representations
of platonic solids.
We see them suggested that they could be memory devices as well, things that hold stories
within them - so that as you tell the story you rotate it and the lines and the nobbles
on the surface help you recount that oral history of your society.
So there are many different explanations for these objects and the truth is it could be
any one of them.
Today we've been making a replica Carved Stone Ball.
This is a type of object that comes from Scotland.
And usually found in sites that are dated to the late Neolithic, so the same time that
Stonehenge is being built.
But these are not objects that are found here at Stonehenge, they only have a distribution
in Scotland.
But what he's making for us is showing the techniques and the tools and the artwork and
decoration that links this Carved Stone Ball to all the other parts of Britain at that
time.
As a second stage you have to grind that to make it a smoother surface.
In Orkney a number have actually been found in Neolithic context, at Skara Brae they were
found on the floor of Neolithic buildings which dates them very firmly to the late Neolithic.
Recently in 2013 one was found at the Ness of Brogdar buried under one of the buttresses
within one of the buildings, one of the largest buildings onsite.
The Carved Stone Ball sits in part of the exhibition that talks about the late Neolithic,
so the time Stonehenge is being built.
At this particular time we have types of pottery, types of objects and styles of building monuments
that are really only found in the British Isle.
They are not found at all on continental Europe.
This is a time when people are making Grooved Ware Pottery that is found all across the
British Isle.
But they are also doing regional things, so Carved Stone Balls in particular are only
found really in a small part of Scotland.
So they've got shared ideas, shared religious ideas, building similar types of monuments
such as stone circles, but there are also still regional traditions and regional trends.
Now the next stage is marking out the individual knobs on the surface.
Here you have to make a choice about what sort of Carved Stone Ball you're going to
make.
Most Carved Stone Balls will have 6 symmetrical knobs, but they come in a wide range of different
sizes, different shapes, from having as few as 3 knobs to having over 200 knobs.
So once you've marked out your knobs you can begin to peck around those areas and actually
define the shape of your Carved Stone Ball.
And you can keep working it until those knobs are quite different shapes, some Carved Stone
Balls have very shallow flat discs, other ones have quite deep, rounded knobs.
So you have a lot of working to do with pecking, very delicate working on that surface.
This was something that stone workers potentially did over series of years, potentially generations
as you pass these balls from one generation to the other people might have added to the
design, reworked them, enhanced them in different ways.
You realise it was a time consuming process but something that the individual stone worker
was really engaging with and something that with each successive generation these objects
became of more significance to the actual person who held them and the person who was
working them.
A treasured biographies of those generations that have passed before you.
Seeing someone actually make one of these objects and being able to handle a replica
in your hands gives you a much better insight into how special and how much time and energy
went into making these particular items.
We're showing some really precious objects here in the exhibition and they've been polished
for hours on end, or they've been carefully constructed from really thin pieces of sheet
gold, or cast in bronze and seeing an insight into that craftsmanship and the amount of
skill and techniques that people had is really eye opening and it brings a whole new dimension
to seeing the actual objects.
Once you've achieved the basic shape you then have to return to grinding it again, and again
very difficult to sort of grind into all those crevices, but you'd probably take a very small
piece of sandstone and just work around those bosses and those knobs to grind that surface
smooth.
And that's generally the finish we see, they didn't go to polish the surface like we see
with polished stone axes, they just ground it to a smooth finish.
And the very final stage is decorating the surface.
And only about 40 Carved Stone Balls out of 500 have decorated surfaces.
And this involved the very fine incision of lines over the surfaces.
We see spiral designs, we see chevrons, we see concentric circles - we see sort of Neolithic
designs which are reminiscent of Passage Grave art that we typically find in Ireland and
up the West Coast of Britain into Orkney.
The Carved Stone Ball that's being recreated today is based on an example found at Old
Deer in Aberdeenshire, which is the real centre of the distributions of Carved Stone Balls.
Most of them come from the North East of Scotland, and this one is a particularly stunning example
because of the decoration on its surface.
But we know very little about its discovery.
It was found, allegedly, in a Cairn and it first sort of came to the attention of antiquarians
in 1874 when it was shown to the Society of Antiquities of Scotland in Edinburgh and it
was published the following year.
It wasn't until 1930 that it was donated to the British Museum.
Seeing a Carved Stone Ball recreated really helps me understand that process of manufacturing
a Carved Stone Ball a little bit more.
It really brings out the number of decisions you have to make during that process of manufacturing
it.
And how slow that process is.
And if we think back to the past they weren't necessarily manufacturing Carved Stone Balls
in one go, this was potentially a process that was drawn out over many years potentially
decades.
It might even be that things were decorated over generations where you began to change
and decorate that Carved Stone Ball in different ways.
But what you realise is that the level of detail and precision of thought that has to
go into that process and that's what really is just wonderful to see someone actually
making a Carved Stone Ball.
If this film has piqued your interest about Carved Stone Balls you can come along and
see it and lots of other amazing objects at the British Museum exhibition here at Stonehenge
which runs until 21st April 2019.
You can also click on the British Museum video to find out more about the Carved Stone Ball.