The Border of Farming and the Cultural Markers - Nordlige Verdener

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vious workshops. This, however, is not an
entirely acurate depiction of the North
Roe situation. In many cases, the quarry
waste does appear to form down-hill
screes – that is, traditional tailing piles –
but in most cases, the linear character
of the debris is a result of the size and
shape of the outcrops, mostly occurring
as kilometre-long dykes, and not gravity.
Basically, it seems, dykes were mined, and
quarry waste deposited either behind the
on-going quarrying operation – that is,
on top of already emptied sections of the
dykes – or next to the exhausted dykes,
resulting in linear accumulations of waste.
Immediately adjacent to the felsite dykes,
workshops were organised to allow further
reduction of selected blocks of raw
material.
Detailed surveys of the main North Roe
procurement centres – the Beorgs of
Uyea ridge in the north and the Midfield
hill in the south – showed that some
specialization may have taken place in
prehistory. The former centre appears to
have focused predominantly on the production
of axeheads, and the latter on
the production of Shetland knives. Indicators
of this are many, such as axehead
Fig. 2:
Denticulated
boulder on
Midfield
– probably an
abandoned
waste ‘core’
from the production
of
knife tool
blanks. Courtesy
of Gabriel
Cooney,
University of
Dublin.