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Steven Birch was on Radio Orkney this morning discussing his work on the High Pasture cave in Unst (http://www.high-pasture-cave.org/) that appears to complement Mine Howe, being a parallel site that still held on to its infill. This shows it to have been in use for about a thousand years before being sealed in the Iron Age. He said that there were so many steatite objects in the deposit that they considered that there was most likely a local seam of soapstone. I think this would set the cat among the pigeons as the presence of this material elsewhere has been seen as specifically evidence for a contact with Shetland or perhaps Scandinavia. I am reminded that there is at least one site (http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/site/5484) in Orkney that has been (tentatively?) assigned to the category of causewayed island dun, and have had suspicions myself that the same may apply to at least some of our brochs in lochs.
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