Portable memory devices – Scottish carved stone balls

Scottish carved stone balls are just the right size to hold in your hand. They are found in Neolithic monumental sites, mostly across Scotland. Why did the Neolithic Scots go to such time-consuming effort to carve hard stone into these shapes? The most common have six knobs, as on the left in the image. Some have large numbers of knobs, as in the centre. And very rarely, they are intricately carved such as the Towie Ball on the right. That would have taken many, many hours of painstaking work.

Why bother?

Because memory devices are absolutely essential in any society which, without writing, depends on memory to store all their knowledge.

Portable memory devices have fascinated me from the moment I first realised they existed in Indigenous cultures the world over. It was very soon after that I was able to identify such devices in archaeological contexts, again all over the world.

In my experiments using a wide range of memory devices, I am constantly astonished by how effective they are in helping me remember. But then again, I shouldn’t be surprised. In The Knowledge Gene, I talk about the way we are biologically encoded to use our spatial skills to enhance our ability to recall information. The Scottish Neolithic carved stone balls are a perfect example. I had written about then in my academic monograph Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies as well as in The Memory Code.

Scottish carved stone balls have been a Neolithic mystery for centuries. There are many theories for their purpose, but shine a memory system lens on them, and all their mystery disappears. All oral cultures – those who do not use writing – depend on a wide range of memory systems. That is how humans managed to store vast amounts of information in memory – a skill we don’t use to anywhere near our full potential in our literate world. Physical memory devices are found in every oral culture.

In my books, I examine the way oral cultures globally employ a fascinating array of memory aids to help store the vast amount of pragmatic information on which their survival, physically and culturally, depends. Indigenous initiates are trained to encode portable objects with information, a process which usually takes years, if not decades. These objects are a key indicator of the mnemonic purpose of ceremonial sites such as circles of stone or timber, sequences of mounds and prehistoric built environments.

From the moment I first saw the enigmatic carved stone balls, I was intrigued. Although many theories had been suggested for their purpose during the Neolithic, none had included the possibility that they were memory devices. Yet their size, designs and archaeological contexts matched the pattern of such objects that I had found in ethnographic studies of non-literate cultures across the world.

In June 2025, I received an email from a reader, Lee Strapp. He sent an image with the accompanying text:

I was working at a veterinary congress in Edinburgh this weekend, and on Saturday evening my colleagues and I were walking through the centre to find somewhere to eat when I spotted these sculptures! I dragged them over to tell them what they were, and excitedly showed them photos of the actual neolithic balls and explained your theory (and recommended The Memory Code of course). Some of the sculptures were football sized and others up to my waist. It made my day to see them!

How fantastic is that?

Another blog had been inspired by the same installation back in 2014. The Urban Prehistorian writes here about the various ideas surrounding the incredible carved stone balls from the Neolithic.

I presented my ideas on portable memory devices at The Archaeology of Portable Art symposium at the Australian National University. Being an Australian conference, the archaeologists were all familiar with the role of Australian Aboriginal art as a mnemonic technology for encoding information. It was a smooth argument to suggest that the carved stone balls, along with the Stonehenge chalk plaques, Grooved Ware pottery and the Folkton Drums, were all perfectly designed to serve the mnemonic needs of elders.

As was evident at the symposium, Australian archaeologists and anthropologists are used to the way our Aboriginal cultures use the landscape, rock art and an array of portable objects to encode information. In Africa, the farming Luba use memory boards, known as lukasa, to store layer upon layer of information. Sitting on the ground, the secretive and powerful Mbudye knowledge specialists hold the lukasa close to the ground in exactly the same way the hunter gatherer Australian elders hold inscribed stone tjuringa. Each portion of the design is touched as the songs encoding the knowledge are chanted or the stories told. It is easy to imagine the inscribed chalk plaques and carved stone balls of the Neolithic used in exactly the same way.

In Australia, we have the advantage of indigenous colleagues at our conferences. Everything, they remind us, has a song; every animal, every plant, every location in the landscape, seascape and skyscape. Every song is represented in the memory technologies, be that landscape sites, standing stones, designs on posts, paintings on rock walls or the portable decorated objects. Without the memory devices, the information would not be structured and critical knowledge would be lost. It is no wonder that these objects are ubiquitous in Indigenous cultures and evident so consistently in the archaeology of monuments built by people who were totally dependent on their memories for everything they knew.

Some of the above is from a blog written for Cambridge University Press after the publication of Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies. Just click on the image and it will take you to their site.

Holding these extraordinary objects was one of the great moments of my life. So here’s a photo of me when much younger with my pure-joy expression.

Photo: Damian Kelly, taken at the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow.

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