Joseph Banks at Skara Brae and Stennis, Orkney, 1772

Abstract

AMONG Banks’s many activities still awaiting professional assessment, his archaeological undertakings are not the least important. At his home, Revesby Abbey, on the edge of the fens near Boston in Lincolnshire, were two tumuli some 300 feet long and half as broad which had been opened before his time but must have excited his curiosity as a boy; in a visit to the west of England when he was twenty-four years old he recorded tumuli near Eastbury, (1) and later that same year he described the careful excavation of a Beaker tomb in South Wales. His methods were greatly in advance of those current at the time. There are many references to archaeological investigations in his later papers and diaries; the most important of these are surely the accounts of the opening of the tombs at Skara Brae on the Links of Skail, and the plans of that area and of the stones of Stennis made in the late autumn of 1772 on his return from Iceland and the Hebrides.