UPDATE: The Fields of the Maeatae?

Breaking News

Jul 04, 2025

I’m on holiday today so a short blog….but this one contains new results about our recent dig on the slopes of Dumyat…so read to the very end! I’ve written about these before. Again we’re dealing with something that has been hiding in plain site for millennia!

First some background….

Cultivation terraces are artificial raised beds on south facing slopes designed to both maximise the space available for growth and to create a microclimate to increase the growing season.

Seven or eight ‘new’ cultivation terraces!

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The big question of course is who built them? Are they the fields of Dumyat or more recent. This season we’re reopening the two we started last year in order to both extract charcoal for radiocarbon dating and to get Optically Stimulate Luminance dates. The latter are being provided for free by St Andrews University as they are so excited by our discovery! We are also getting Glasgow University to to do phytolith analysis on the soil to discover what was grown here again for free! And of course the whole project is supported by Edinburgh University on whose land we’re digging on…double wow! Can I possibly squeeze any more exclamations marks into a paragraph?

Troy and his burial mound!

And if all of that wasn’t enough we have a roundhouse and a previously unknown burial mound in the mix!

Yet again Stirling has this incredible amazing potential, all just lying under our feet. We’re finding it, you and I. Whether you pick up a spade or just read this blog we are literally changing history every year!

and on the first day a wonderful surprises…a 6000 year old bit of worked flint, a likely knife, certainly a tool…found by the ever vigilant Troy! Here is the report on it and the other bits of struck quartz

The flint as pictured by Sue Mackay.

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