Tomb of Eagles

A Neolithic chambered cairn built around 3000 BC on South Ronaldsay, Orkney, containing the remains of over 340 people and at least eight white-tailed sea eagles. Discovered by a farmer in 1958 and excavated over the following decades.

On a summer evening in 1958, Orkney farmer Ronnie Simison was digging flagstones near the cliffs at Isbister when he noticed a section of horizontal stones exposed in the earth. He dug down and found a cache of polished stone artefacts: a mace head, three axe heads, a black button, and a small chert knife. Returning a few days later, he uncovered a small stone chamber containing about thirty human skulls. What he had thought might be a dwelling was a tomb, five thousand years old.

Simison waited nearly twenty years before excavating further. After observing professional archaeologists at work on a Bronze Age site nearby, he began his own careful excavation of the tomb in 1976. Between 1976 and 1982, he recovered approximately sixteen thousand human bones representing at least three hundred and forty individuals. The skulls had been arranged along the chamber walls. The bones had been grouped and stacked. No intact skeletons remained; the dead had been excarnated before deposition, their flesh removed as part of the funeral process.

Among the human bones were the remains of white-tailed sea eagles. Talons and bones from eight to twenty birds, some deposited as whole carcasses in the central part of the chamber. Radiocarbon dating revealed that the eagles died between approximately 2450 and 2050 BC, up to a thousand years after the tomb was first built. The community that used this tomb maintained their relationship with it, and with the eagles, far longer than anyone had imagined.

Archaeologist John Hedges became friends with the Simison family and mounted a full academic study. His 1984 book, Tomb of the Eagles: Death and Life in a Stone Age Tribe, established the site's significance in the scholarly literature and gave it the name by which it is now known worldwide.