That's an interesting thought - there is an awful lot of acheology on Orkney in very accessible places, and despite its apparent remoteness, it was a lot more connected, accessible and arable than the nearby Scottish Highlands, so you'd have expected a lot of the stone to have been reused for building material.
It looks like some were. Whenever a structure has usable materials, people are prone to prying them loose to reuse. There's a whole branch of archaeology that looks at things like stone and metal to figure out where they came from. It can tell you not only where something was quarried, but sometimes, you can trace that it was part of a road and then a building, or whatever.
Wow!
Date: 2025-04-18 10:27 pm (UTC)The archaeologist and the scrounge in my head are arguing. This happens often when I look at ruins.
Scrounge: "That is a lot of usable material."
Archaeologist: "Noooo don't touch the old things!"
Re: Wow!
Date: 2025-04-19 05:10 pm (UTC)Re: Wow!
Date: 2025-04-20 09:27 am (UTC)