Rare Skara Brae Figurine Rediscovered in Scotland

STROMNESS, SCOTLAND—According to a report in The Orcadian, a figurine unearthed on the largest of the Orkney Islands in the 1860s has been rediscovered in a box at Stromness Museum. Dubbed the “Skara Brae Buddo,” the figurine had been packed away among artifacts from Skaill House, a historic manor overlooking the Neolithic site of Skara Brae, since the 1930s. The 5,000-year-old figurine, carved from a piece of whalebone, was originally found in the remains of a house in the Neolithic village. Modern scholars only knew of the sculpture, which has eyes and a mouth cut in its face and a navel in its body, from a sketch in the nineteenth-century notebooks kept by antiquarian George Petrie. Researchers think the holes in the carving may have been used to suspend it.