Sadly there were no reasonable comments on the Caithness Project - so come on Skye folks- what do you think? Can we come up with a reasonable hypothesis? I seem to remember Alan had a theory about dogs????
Looking at the Caithness broch project - they were talking about partitions inside the broch - Dun Fiadhairt possibly shows a partition like that - could these partitions be of a later date than the original structure? That seemed to be the case with Scatness in Shetland. Just wondering if originally they lived above the animals (heat rises!) then as the broch fell into some disrepair, hundreds of years later, maybe they started living on the ground floor? So if they didn't originally live on the ground floor - could the cells have been places to store food for the animals?
What a good idea - that they might have moved lower as the tower structure failed. It might also be less necessary after the danger - whatever it was - reduced. At Dun Beag (Struan) that might have been a bit uncomfortable, though - there was a lump of solid rock rising in the middle of the ground so they would, I think, always have needed a raised floor of a couple of feet at least.
ReplyDeletePartitions: makes sense to me - keep the animals from the fodder. Or the boys from the girls, so they could control which bred with which and when?