A wonderful find.Mind you Iam a bit confused about the fact that they grew potatoes. I thought potatoes originated in the New World and that Sir Walter Raleigh
introduced them to England in the 16 th or was it the
17 th century.

1.
My thoughts exactly. It will be interesting to see what explanation is given.

Come on Mt Ross, 'fess up. You didn't do your research properly on this tattie article, did you?

Perhaps in our "chip" saturated society, we can't imagine a world without them. I'm sure they'll dig up tea leaves, coffee grounds, bits of chocolate and the odd pomegranate too.

#4 Scullion. And don't forget the odd tin can.

Good grief, no need for research on tatties, tomatos, tobacco, maize, cocoa, coca, chilli, turkey, hampster and, what else?

What, no deep fried Mars bars!

Potato cultivation was brought to Europe in the 1530's from Peru after Francisco Pizarro conquered it. It came to Spain first.

The evidence that these guys are looking at are the "lazy beds" that are prevelent around that area. That form of cultivation came some time after the iron age dwellings were lost to the sea and people had to move further in land and farm poorer less well drained ground instead of the fertile machair.

can we not protect the site with sheet piles or some other retaining structure untill it is investigated fully. obviously ground conditions will dictate what solution can be used plus the risk of damage to buried treasures may be a problem but geophysiscs and sufficient wayleaves should solve.

John Ross, what an ignoramus! Shows the quality of history teaching and general knowledge these days!

How does it take two and a half years to organise a dig at an endangered site,lets get a move on and learn as much as possible about our history.

As one of the archaeologists working on this site, I should point out that we did not find evidence of potato cultivation, it was tomatoes...(only joking).
The question about protecting the site is a good one, but unfortunately it is a case of economics - there are hundreds of threatened sites, not only in the Western Isles, but in Orkney, Shetland and elsewhere. Choosing which site to work on is tricky, and one way to do this is to find out which sites local people think should be excavated. Getting the money to mount an excavation can be hard enough, but trying to protect a site which will inevitably be destroyed is almost impossible.

#12: Sorry, as someone who might actually know what you're talking about, you're not really allowed to post here. There's too much danger that you might inject a note of reality into the conversation. Sorry and all that.

Tom Dawson , are there any pictures online ?

Found it Tom..

http://www.shorewatch.co.uk/html/bailesear.html

#13 - sorry, would it help if i explained that the site was on a ley line that joined the water tower on benbecula to the puff inn on st kilda?
#15 - there are a few more details about the site, and others, at http://www.shorewatch.co.uk/ click on the link to groups, then click on the link to north uist.

I too noticed a huge error in this report: potatoes as well as corn could not have been grown on Uist 2000 years ago because they had not been introduced. The world was still flat in those days so no one was going anywhere near the source...geez! Get with it!!

The potato was domesticated in southern Peru and northern Bolivia and is important to the culture of the Andes, where farmers grow many different varieties that have a remarkable diversity of colors and shapes. In pre-Colombian times they were also widely cultivated on Chiloé Island, in Chile. Potatoes spread from South America to Spain and from there to the rest of the world after European colonization in the late 1400s and early 1500s. They soon became an important field crop.

Miss Pixie,
If I have this wrong then those more knowledgable will pounce, but I recall that in Europe the word "corn" may refer to wheat, and what we Yanks call corn they call "Indian corn" to tell the two apart.
With that said, let me just hope that the devolved parliamant in Edinburgh can require and (at least modestly) fund faster authorization of site surveys and digs lest the remaining records of our ancestors be lost forever. We never know what we will learn, and we will not learn unless we dig.

Archaeological stories in the popular press are usually not too accurate.
So it's not surprising that there are mistakes in this article.
As stated already there were no potatoes in the Iron age.
Who ever wrote this article seems to have got his facts mixed up.
Probably found a list of crops grown by those in Scotland in recent times and thought that it could'nt have changed much so wrote them down.
And as for the word corn. Did originally mean wheat.