The first island was made of wood<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
“While crannogs were long thought to have been built, used and re-used, mainly between the Iron Age and the post-medieval period, we now know that some were first constructed much earlier during the Neolithic between 3800 and 3300 BC,” Blankshein said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For Loch Bhorgastail, the team’s interim excavation report, published in October 2024, puts the first platform at about 3500 to 3350 B.C. It was made by laying “substantial quantities of felled willow and birch logs directly onto loch bed silts in an already wet environment,” the report says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The brushwood on top was mostly hazel and held “very high quantities of hazelnuts, indicating that it is likely to have been laid down in the autumn,” according to the report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So the wood was in the loch at least three centuries before Stonehenge’s first circular ditch was dug around 3000 B.C., and before two wooden posts at Bulford may have started marking the summer sunrise<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An upper layer of brushwood dates to the Middle Bronze Age, between about 1410 and 1220 B.C. The report’s authors say it “presumably represents a raising of the islet at that point,” probably on the western half, because the eastern half “may have been tipping down into the water by then.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their working hypothesis is that stones were then moved west into shallower water to build the smaller stone islet and cairn that stand above the surface today. A stone causeway, now underwater, runs from the shore out to the island.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A small pit and a patch of burnt material point to low-level activity in the Early Iron Age, around 750 to 410 B.C.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jack Pink, a University of Southampton graduate student who dove on the 2021 underwater team, described the dig in a blog post for the Advisory Council on Underwater Archaeology<\/a>. “The majority of our work takes place in less than a meter of water. I could stand on our steel grid and the water wouldn’t reach my waist, but I don’t,” he wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Even before the dredges start running sinuous lengths of timber can be seen protruding from the loch bed. These things are impossibly old. I am used to timbers from the 19th century,” Pink wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It takes a few days for the team to get into our stride but rapidly the sediments are peeled back revealing an astonishing layer of cut timbers, coppice-like roundwood, and huge sections of tree as thick as my thigh,” he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Near the end of the season he dove with Fraser Sturt, a Southampton archaeologist who co-leads the project, to the point where the site’s shallow slope plunges into deeper water, about 20 feet (6 meters) down. “We have found things here, huge sherds of pottery a third or quarter of a vessel covered in the herringbone and lines of the smaller pieces above,” Pink wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 2023 season alone produced 413 pottery fragments from at least 163 vessels, which Mike Copper of the University of Bradford analyzed. They add to 372 fragments from 2021 and 99 from earlier work, and all but five of the 2023 vessels are early Neolithic types. The other five are Bronze Age or Iron Age jars. Organic residue was visible on 15 of the 2023 sherds, all of them Neolithic, and with the sooting it suggests many pots had been used for cooking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “While we still don’t know exactly why these islands were built, the resources and labour required to construct them suggests, not only complex communities capable of such feats, but also the great significance of these sites,” Blankshein said. “Large quantities of pottery, often still containing food residue, and worked stone found on and around the islands, suggest their use for communal activities such as cooking or feasting.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a 2019 paper in Antiquity, Garrow and Sturt reported heavy soot on the outside of many pots and charred residues inside some, so the vessels “had clearly been used before deposition.” Feasting has been proposed at other British sites as well, where Bronze Age communities held massive meat feasts<\/a> that may have helped hold groups together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The new paper deals with a practical gap that the authors call the “white ribbon” of missing data. “Terrestrial survey methods reach their limit at the water’s edge, whereas marine geophysical equipment often struggles in depths of less than 1 m,” they write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Fine sediments, choppy conditions, floating vegetation and distorted or reflected light all hinder shallow water imaging. Photogrammetry is very effective in deep water but runs into problems at depths of less than a metre,” said Sturt, a professor and director of the Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute. “This problem is a well-known frustration for archaeologists.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Photogrammetry builds a 3D model by stitching together many overlapping photos. The team fixed two GoPro Hero 9 cameras on a frame 11.4 inches (29 centimeters) apart, and a diver steered the rig over the trench while it took paired shots every three seconds, so each pair carried a built-in scale bar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Satellite signals do not pass through water, so the team had to tie the underwater pictures to the map another way. “We reversed the approach by extending underwater GCPs above the surface using vertical metal rods,” the authors write, referring to ground control points, the surveyed markers that pin a model to real coordinates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “By combining stereophotogrammetry, drone technology and some innovative post-processing of the data, we have managed to set out an accessible approach that is portable and cost effective,” Blankshein said. Similar limits face teams elsewhere, including archaeologists working in 3 to 13 feet of water in Kyrgyzstan’s Lake Issyk-Kul<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Problems remain, “including vegetation interference, reflective substrates, and the fusion of overlapping models,” the authors write, and parts of the white ribbon around the island were never fully covered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Flooding in 2023 stopped the team from digging the larger south quadrant, so it is still unclear whether anything beyond a patch of wattling was built on the Neolithic platform. The Middle Bronze Age phase also “remains not certainly represented on the site in terms of material culture,” the report says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a 2023 review of 582 island sites in Scotland, the same group wrote that “only a small percentage (15%) of the nearly 600 sites have seen excavation of any kind” and “only 26% have dating evidence of any kind.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Crucially, of those sites which have been dug, almost none has seen excavation down to the lowest, and therefore earliest, layers,” they added.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBronze Age builders raised it again<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Divers worked in water below the waist<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Three](\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/trench-timber-platform.jpg\")
Hundreds of pots ended up in the loch<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Fragments](\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/en-22-medio2-neolithic-pot-fragments.jpg\")
Two cameras solved the shallow-water problem<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Many questions are still open<\/h2>\n\n\n\n