Scotland’s carved stone balls

I Digress

24 Oct

Today we digress from Stonehenge to talk about some strange carved stone balls found throughout Scotland.

Where the balls were discovered

There are many carved things that have been found throughout parts of Scotland that date back to between 3000 and 2600 BC and the carved stone balls are just one of a range.

Hundreds of these stone balls have been found, about 400, and they mainly date back to the Prehistoric era, even though they have been found in a wide area their exact purpose seems to be a lot harder to track down, and their relative rarity doesn’t help this at all.

Most of the balls are sized to fit quite nicely into the palm of the hand. They’re pretty much all the same size about 7 cm, or if you’re of an imperial persuasion that’s 2.75 inches, so not really that big at all.

Most have been found just by pure coincidence and their location and exact contexts not properly recorded, again making it difficult to pin down what they were exactly used for. But a couple have been found during archaeological excavations, such as a handful found at Skara Brae in Orkney. They were found at a Late Neolithic site that was being excavated and the context in which the balls were discovered makes it possible that they had some kind of ritual significance.

While most of these stone balls have been found in Scotland, particularly Aberdeenshire, a couple seemed to have made their way abroad, a few have been found in Ireland, northern England and one even made it all the way to Norway.

National Museums Scotland holds the largest collection of these carved stone balls in Edinburgh at roughly 200 and they have a further 60 casts as well. But probably the most famous of the carved stone balls found is the Towie Ball. It was found in Aberdeenshire during the 19th century and is pretty cool to look at. It has circles, spirals and lines all carved into the stone making four knobs. If you’re keen to check out what this and other examples of carved stone balls then check out the images on the right.

Here’s Hugo Anderson-Whymark, the curator at National Museums Scotland, to tell us a bit more about this fantastic find:

The Towie carved stone ball is the finest example of a carved stone ball from Scotland and the motifs on it are just absolutely incredible. The very fine grooves on the surface are about a millimetre across and have all been carved with a flint tool. Incredibly fine, delicate workmanship.

The stone ball itself is of a black, fine-grained stone, it is just over 7 cm across at 73 mm and weighs about 500 g. There are four discs, or what are known as knobs, that hold the intricate carvings of the circles, spirals and lines.

How the balls were made

So because all the stone balls found seem to date to the Late Neolithic period and are made from a range of stones, it shows the ingenuity of these prehistoric people, we must remember that the Neolithic people had very little tools that would aid them in the kind of intricate carvings found on the balls. It’s also this ingenuity without the common use of advanced tools that makes Stonehenge such a head scratcher.

In fact, some of the early archaeologists to study these carved balls found it pretty tough to believe that people could have sat carving these balls with just stone tools and so they incorrectly thought that the later Picts, who were wandering around Scotland between the late Iron age and early Medieval period, were the ones who had carved the stone balls.

But later archaeologists were able to disprove this and realised that the stone balls actually dated to the much earlier Neolithic period, meaning that the stones would have been carved by just using stones tools. And with each stone ball having anywhere between 3 and 160 knobs on the surface with intricately beautiful patterns carved into them, it would have taken an immense amount of skill and patience.

It also seems that a range of talents were carving the balls, this is mainly seen in the level of intricacy per ball. Some have no ornamentation at all, while others have full-on engraved patterns of decoration. And yet all show a similar symmetrical design.

Because of the fact that the only tools available to the Neolithic peoples were made of stone, that meant that the balls were shaped and carved by using the stone tools readily available to them as well as the uses of sand, water, patience and effort.

It’s interesting that people who were slowly moving away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and were starting to settle into small farming communities would have dedicated time for this practice of shaping and carving stone into balls, perhaps this is why some believe the balls were a sign of prominence. Here’s what Anderson-Whymark thinks:

[They] are more likely to be objects which represent the status or power of the individual that held them in the community.

What were the balls used for?

Despite the amount of balls that have been found, there really is no hard evidence for what their main use or purpose was, but that hasn’t stopped historians and scholars from speculating.

What makes this speculation particularly difficult is that most of the balls show little to no signs of use or damage, which means you can’t look at the wear and tear in an attempt to decipher what they were used for.

Some think they were used as a part of a weighing system, sort of like scales and the stone balls were the weights, but this is sort of dismissed because there isn’t really very much uniformity that would make weights make sense. Then another thought came along that they may have been used to weigh down fishing nets, which does make a lot of sense, except then why would you spend so much time carving elaborate designs into them? So that doesn’t really explain them either.

An Australian author, Lynne Kelly, taking inspiration from Australian Aboriginal cultures and their rock art, thinks that the stone balls could have been used as ‘memory devices’ where the carvings are used as reminders when orally telling histories and stories.

Another strong theory is that the balls could have been used as weapons, where the grooves in between the knobs would have been where the leather or rope would go to fasten them to a wooden handle or the like. Except the issue with this is that there are no signs of damage that one would associate with throwing the rock around. Dorothy N. Marshall, who did quite an extensive study of the balls in the 1970s, has this to say about this theory:

When one appreciates the skill and time which has been used in the fashioning of these balls, it does not seem possible that the owner would have risked their loss or damage in war or chase.

She’s got a good point there.

There is a general thought that the stone balls may have held some social or cultural significance to communities and would have been viewed as symbols of power or prominence.

If this is in fact the case, then the Towie Ball probably would have belonged to a well-off Neolithic farmer in Aberdeenshire who viewed it as a symbol of power, particularly because the symbols carved into the stone resemble those found in a passage tomb at Newgrange in Ireland. Here’s Anderson-Whymark on the similarities between these two locations:

One thing they show is that there was perhaps a long-distance contact in that period which we don’t always give prehistoric people credit for…We’re seeing things, ideas and people moving with them through that time.

Without having solid evidence to base a theory as to the balls real purpose, Anderson-Whymark decided to create 3D images of the objects and make these publicly accessible. By using photogrammetry, which is the technique of takings hundreds of 2D images and rendering them into the 3D space, he was able to create full 3D renders of about 60 of the balls in the National Museums Scotland collection. And the best part is that all of these renders are available online for anyone who cares to have a look at them, check out this link if you are one of those people.

By looking at the 3D renders produced, new information has been able to be seen, particularly in relation to the carving and chipping marks. Here’s Anderson-Whymark’s two cents:

Actually being able to see them in virtual reality is hugely valuable… It allows us to see some fine detail which we didn’t spot before. There’s one of them that has concentric lines on the circles, and no one had ever seen that before and it’s been in our collection for well over 100 years.

The 3D renders also showed that some of the stones were changed over time, the professionals are thinking possibly across generations. It’s a little hazy at the moment on what this could exactly mean, but it definitely budges the door open on the possibilities in relation to the stone balls’ purpose. Here’s what old mate had to say about that:

It’s telling us how they worked and re-worked over time. It’s allowing us to explore that bigger story of how they were made and how they developed, which is potentially going to tell us more about that bigger theory of how they were used.

It seems that the mystery of the carved stone balls will continue for now, even though we don’t really have any idea about what their purpose was or how they were used, they are still pretty cool to look at. And to end here’s a last word from everyone’s favourite curator:

Many of the ideas you have to take with a pinch of salt, while there are others that may be plausible. What’s interesting is that people really get their imaginations captured by them – they still hold a lot of secrets … but they’re always going to be slightly enigmatic.

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